Visualising climate change : An effort in community participation

What is it about?

Climate change is a growing concern and demands immediate remedial actions globally. This necessitates widespread community participation. Unfortunately, although municipal climate adaptation plans have been developed, participation within communities is limited. This is because of a limited understanding of climate change and its effects, owing largely to inadequate awareness and difficulty in understanding jargon-heavy information available on the topic. Now, authors from Canada suggest the benefit of employing visualisations, including photographs and interactive maps, to effectively communicate complex scientific information on climate change in a simpler manner. They see their value as effective social learning tools to engage the community and develop suitable climate change adaptation strategies.

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Photo by Paavan B on Unsplash

Photo by Paavan B on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Communicating scientific concepts like climate change to people is not easy. And the absence of proper knowledge mobilisation sometimes leads to mistrust, denial, uncertainty, and skepticism among individuals, making it more difficult to involve them in climate action. This gap in research and communication needs to be filled through workshops, town halls, newspapers, and articles, to engage communities in addressing the threat of climate change. Learning tools and resource materials for communicating climate change science need to be easily comprehensible, relatable, and engaging to ensure community participation and foster a sense of ownership in coming up with socially-acceptable strategies to deal with climate change at the local levels. KEY TAKEAWAY Visualisation tools like photographs, spatial data, historical aerial photographs in geographic information systems, etc., help to communicate landscape-level physical changes better. It draws on our sense of sight to realise the effects of climate change on the surroundings. Erosion, accretion, and degradation become apparent when perceived via before-and-after comparison photographs. Therefore, visualisation is the key to bringing research closer to people and help them better understand the local impacts of climate change. This, in turn, can ensure their participation in decision making and adaptation processes to collectively combat climate change.

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