One-Planet Talking blog

[This post is part of a series offered by IECA members attending COP24 in Katowice, Poland.]

This is my first time at COP and since I am participating during the second week, I had the opportunity to check on some notes from a fellow COP24 observer who attended meetings last week. On my way to Katowice, I read a note by Marissa Lerner on 6th December about a Wrap-up Meeting of the Preparatory Phase for Talanoa Dialogue. The Chinese delegation’s statement sparked my interest. Her (or his?) statement was: “… IPCC is composed of very specialized scientists who can provide good predictions of scenarios as to economic and social costs or impacts. As to political risks involved they don’t have sufficient information.”

I am attending the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) climate change negotiations, COP24, for the first time this week. In UN-lingo “COP24” means this is the 24th Conference of the Parties since 1995 when COP1 was held in Berlin, Germany. 

The COP24 is taking place in Katowice, Poland from Dec. 2 to 14. It has brought tens of thousands of people, including delegates, or “parties,” along with civil society representatives, to Poland’s Upper Silesia region. 

As media coverage has already noted, this is Polish coal country, with about 80% of the nation’s electricity coming from that fossil fuel. The major expected policy outcome of this round of international climate negotiations is the “rulebook” for putting the much-heralded 2015 Paris Agreement into practice. 

As a gathering of heads of state, multinational organizations and civil society, can the UNFCCC and other climate action stakeholders use these arguably esoteric negotiations as a mechanism to engage people in their home countries on climate change? 

[This post is part of a series offered by IECA members attending COP24 in Katowice, Poland.]

In the westernmost reaches of Nunavut, on the Northwest Passage, Inuit hunters have told me some pithy things about climate change.

The land is changing. It isn’t climate change. This is part of cycles. Our elders saw this coming.

Some of the most visible and profound effects of global warming are occurring in the Arctic. Some Inuit are worried climate change will permanently alter the world. Others say it will pass, as other times of want and plenty have passed through the Inuit’s long cycles of life in the Arctic.

In Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit homeland in Canada, perceptions about climate change cannot be divided into two camps of “believers” and “deniers.” The situation is far more complex.

To understand climate change communication and adaptation in maritime communities, my research team has travelled to the Canadian Arctic, Indonesia and the Philippines to find out what local communities have to say about climate change.

The answer so far? It varies.

The two week session of UN Climate Change negotiations has begun in Katowice, Poland. Six IECA members are participating. 

We will post comments periodically. Our first week team is Jill Hopke, Anna Palliser, and Gregg Walker (me).

This morning - on the long bus ride from Krakow to Katowice, I sat next to one of the senior negotiators from Chile.  I learned a lot about what he and colleagues in other developing countries hope for and expect from the COP.  He believes that the Parties will approve a Paris “Rule Book,” although he (and many of us here) are concerned about the implications of Brazil’s presidential election.

Greetings Folks,

A month or two back, long-time member, and former IECA chair and EC journal editor Steve Depoe, suggested we support the National Science Teachers Association's position statement on "The Teaching of Climate Science." The board wholeheartedly agreed and I drafted a letter for the board to review, edit and OK for release.

Finally, I've completed and mailed a letter to the NSTA in support of their position. Below is the letter.

Best,

Richard J. Doherty, Chair

Environmental Communication Educators: I teach an undergraduate course in Environmental Communication at the University of Cincinnati once or twice a year. The course usually enrolls 30-40 students, and is dual-listed as an elective in our Environmental Studies major.

I have a new goal for the course this year--help students to build their news feeds with sites and sources pertaining to climate change, other environmental concerns, and ways in which active citizens can address those concerns via communication, political mobilization, and more.

Each of us builds our own information environment, either consciously or consciously, by what we attend to, view, read, click, and buy. Social media platforms contain embedded algorithms that feed back to us what sponsors think we want to see. We create and reinforce our own internet filter bubbles every day.

Warning: This is going to get a bit meta.

Ever since launching the IECA website 7 years ago, one question has pursued me. What does environmental communication look like?

Visitors to the site will be very familiar with the image of the green phone box in the countryside that decorates the home page. You might even be a bit tired of it :-)

Well, change is coming. We will soon be working on an overdue update to the IECA website. We will be re-theming (changing the look) of the site. And we will be making it mobile-friendly by using a responsive design. At the same time, we want to add some new images.

So, how can we show environmental communication in action? I don't mean how to show environmental issues like climate change, air pollution, forest plunder, etc. No, this is meta. How can we show communication about those and other environmental issues?

By IECA Board members Hanna Morris and Nancy Van Leuven

Set amidst the bluest skies and towering pines of Eugene, Oregon, IAMCR 2018 was focused on sustainability and media research, an ideal opportunity for IECA Board members Gabi Hadil, Hanna Morris, and Nancy Van Leuven to join a multitude of IAMCR board panelists to debate a hot topic:  How can conferences be more sustainable?

IECA members and list-servers: Hi again. New thread here. As you know, I am interested in building value for IECA as a professional organization, and also in growing the scope and impact of environmental communication as a global academic field as well as an ethical enterprise of practice.

Here is a new and important idea, something we should already be doing on our own as environmental scholars/educators/advocates practitioners and IECA members, but something we can do together to leverage our numbers and our diversity as a community.

Let's increase our social media activity to circulate the latest results of environmental communication research, relevant news from around the world, scientific breakthroughs in climate change and other areas, and a host of other topics. Let's expand the EC social media universe!!

IECA colleagues: As you may know, since Fall 2015 I have required students taking my undergraduate Environmental Communication course to join IECA with a student membership plus on-line journal subscription (2017 cost: $76). I have built a number of assignments around this membership that I call "IECA excursions." See https://theieca.org/resources/courses/environmental-communication-ieca-excursion-assignments for a list of assignments. I have pitched the membership to students as on par or less expensive than a textbook in many of their classes, plus providing exposure to a professional organization in a possible career field for some of them.

On Monday, the final day of the International Communication Association’s annual conference, the IECA hosted a panel entitled "Engaging Diverse Voices in Environmental Communication Pedagogy." The panel was at 8:00am but we had a great turnout! There were five thought-provoking "quick talks" and an excellent conversation with the surprisingly awake and engaged early-rising attendees (see the attached photo).

Hi All,

I had the opportunity to be on the radio and talk a little about the IECA and our new local symposium initiative. I also spoke about the new weekly environmental radio show Ecotones that I am hosting on WMPG 90.9.

Here is the URL for the interview -  archive-player

The archive only last 6 weeks and the show was on March 15th, so take a listen now!

Friends--I am posting my annual call asking you to renew your IECA membership for 2018, or to join in 2018 if you have never been a member or have let your membership lapse in 2017. We need your voice, your participation, and your financial support to move this organization forward into the future.

[This post is part of a series offered by IECA members attending COP23 Fiji in Bonn.]

Reflecting on another marathon COP as I fly back to an Alberta recovering from wildfires, I am thinking of the silk frangipani flower in my suitcase. I had asked a Pacific delegate whether it was indeed a frangipani in her hair, a bloom that Indonesia’s Balinese women wear and place in Hindu offerings every morning. She confirmed it was, then explained that Pacific islanders weave them into garlands like a crown around their heads. Then she insisted I keep the flower.

At this “Pacific COP”, led by the Fiji Presidency but hosted far from the increasingly storm-battered islands of the Pacific Ocean, flowers were everywhere, worn by Pacific women delegates and the glowing young men and women who filmed their testaments for the Pacific Climate Warriors to share at these talks. These messages are full of love and practical defiance, a call to keep “1.5 to stay alive” but also an acknowledgment that there may well be a future where home will be a space of memory, destroyed by storms or drowned by rising seas.

There are often hints of tears.

[This post is part of a series offered by IECA members attending COP23 Fiji in Bonn.]

I see suits. After 11 days and 25 side events, visions of a sea of men in dark suits and short back and sides are swimming before my eyes. Even as I sit at the Indonesia pavilion facing the palm trees and thatch huts of the Fiji pavilion, with men in batik shirts and women with frangipani-adorned hair strolling past me, the overwhelming impression is of men in suits.

It’s not just me. Mary Robinson remarked on it too. The past Irish president and past UN Commissioner for Human Rights, now busy with the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, declared during a Climate Action Studio interview that it was nice to see women outnumber the men for a change. Robinson was one of four speakers, two men and two women, but the gender re-balance occurred courtesy of the 15-year-old girl conducting the interview. A few days earlier, the equally eloquent Anote Tong, former president of Kiribati and tireless climate warrior, told a worshipful room that Kiribati would disappear, but its people had plenty of time if we work on pre-emptive responses and training to prepare them for eventual climate-induced migration. The Kiribati diaspora would shine in new worlds, he said, and then he singled out a female compatriot and declared there was nothing to stop a beautiful Kiribati woman from becoming the prime minister of Australia.

[This post is part of a series offered by IECA members attending COP23 Fiji in Bonn.]

One of the most remarkable innovations at COP23 Fiji has been its Talanoa Space in the Bonn zone. It features a huge wall of green foliage and red, white and pink flowers, a vibrant shock of tropical colour amid the cool white tones that permeate the spaces of COP. Speakers are seated in rotund wicker chairs, facing a tiered amphitheatre dotted with floor mats where audience members can comfortably sit cross-legged. The Talanoa Space includes smaller intimate spaces with more relaxed seating, where the occasional musician might start strumming a guitar amid the passing crowd of badge-wearing delegates.

The first 2017 edition of Environmental Communication is now available, marking the inaugural issue of my term as Editor-in-Chief.

Featuring a new cover design and article layout, the issue is headlined by studies authored by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and collaborators at the Annenberg Public Policy Center; by Robert M. Perkowitz and colleagues at ecoAmerica; by James T. Spartz, Dominique Brossard and others at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; by Bruno Takahashi and colleagues at Michigan State University; and by Edna Einsiedel and collaborators at the University of Calgary. Go to the issue full line up of studies and articles. 

Over the past few months, we have added several top scholars and experts to our Associate Editor team including Shirley Ho (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Jonathon Schuldt (Cornell University), Declan Fahy (Dublin City University, Ireland), and Silje Kristiansen (University of Zurich / Northeastern University).

[This post is part of a series offered by IECA members attending COP22 in Marrakech.]

This is my 8th consecutive Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change.  As I have observed the UNFCCC negotiations for the past few years, I have experienced the turmoil of Copenhagen, the salvation at Cancun, the Goundhog Day pace in Doha, and the celebration in Paris.  I arrived in Marrakech from Philadelphia, after the US national election and the National Communication Association conference.  I wondered how the prospect of a Trump US Presidency would affect work at COP 22.

[This post is part of a series offered by IECA members attending COP22 in Marrakech.]

Today, Giles Dodson and I (along with 500 or so others) listened to US Secretary of State John Kerry talk about climate change at the UNFCCC.  Interestingly, we didn't know he was going to be speaking until this morning, but as soon as I saw that he would be talking, I knew I wanted to attend.  I never got to see him speak when he was running for president, so it was exciting to see him talk in person.

[This post is part of a series offered by IECA members attending COP22 in Marrakech.]

In addition to what Giles wrote about yesterday´s side event, it is worth mentioning the complex bureaucracy that continues to grow after each COP. It is hard work to navigate in the mist of acronyms. Dr. Saleemul Huq called for a more empathetic and human forms of meetings -beyond the acronyms- which can strengthen cooperation and exchange of knowledge and ideas. This side event was a vibrant example of the latter. I hope the discussion will go on.