In this course we talked a lot about uncertainty, how multifaceted it is and where it originates from. Depending on how uncertainty is framed or tackled, it will affect policies in certain ways. We slipped into different roles for our role-plays and invited professionals for our panel discussion. Evaluating this course and talking with friends and family about it, I recognized something:
We missed the voice of an important group: The voice of lay people. Those with low-income, less educated, but who will be most affected in the end. Sure, we had one role-play about how much and how to protect coral-reefs, where local island citizens could share their perspective. Beside that, we had more role-plays with highly-educated people: scientists, business-representatives, politicians… We invited two professors, one journalist and one politician to our panel discussion. They all had an academic background, are skilled in their field of profession and acquired a lot of knowledge over time. Although they had different professional backgrounds, the group of panelists were still quite homogeneous: aware of climate change, see the need in climate action, educated and well-paid professions.
Imagine this scenery: You are a mom or dad, haven’t got the luxury to go to university instead you started working right after school. You have two low-income jobs, are taking extra shifts and try to secure the living of your family. The bills are piling up and the rent has increased recently due to raising energy and heating costs.
One day your kid comes back from school and suddenly she/ he doesn’t want to go to school on Friday. Your kid mentioned something about Fridays for Future, protecting the environment, a man-made climate crisis happens right now and she/ he wants to protest on the streets.
What are your first thoughts? How could you undertake a climate-friendly living, if you barely can pay for the living standard you have right now?
Those climate debates we see on TV, YouTube, in news articles or other media platforms are mostly held with people, who are experienced in their field of professions or have an academical training. I am not saying, that we should stop interviewing them. We need their expertise for reasoning the decision-making.
According to statistics from the bpb (federal center for political education) in 2018 [1], in general 21% in Germany work in low-income jobs. The number is even higher in the group of workers with no vocational training (48%). One-fifth of the German population count’s into that group. We should not ignore their perspective by not talking to them or inviting them to panel discussions. We should cooperate more with them and take their voice more into account.
Lee et al. (2015), [2] studied the worldwide variation in public awareness regarding climate change. The authors highlight that public awareness and risk perception is influenced by their socio-demographic characteristics, perceived well-being and more. A tailored education and communication in this subject for the individual groups is of immense importance. Another study by Shi et al. (2015, [3]) investigated the correlation between knowledge in climate change and the willingness of people to support climate-friendly policies. The author distinguish between different level of knowledge, like physical or causal as well as action-related knowledge. They state that with related concerns about climate change, peoples willingness in changing towards more climate-friendly behaviours raises. And this starts with knowledge transfer.
Clearly, there is difficulty in reaching lay people and attracting their interest towards this subject. But it is so important to raise their awareness, include their perception and perspective, integrate them more actively in this debate. We should not only have the perception and perspective of experts or high-ranked people because lay people are harder to reach. And as a consequences divide the population in a group who can adapt/ mitigate to the climate change in time and the other group who cannot afford it. This is not only a question about better adapting or mitigating to climate change but more about fairness as well as social and climate justice.
References:
[1] Bildung, B. F. P. (2022, 2. Februar). Volltextsuche: Einkommensgruppen. bpb.de. visited on the 1st of August 2022, von https://www.bpb.de/themen/suche/?global=true&global-format-main=all&global-year=all&term=Einkommensgruppen
[2] Lee, T., Markowitz, E., Howe, P. et al. Predictors of public climate change awareness and risk perception around the world. Nature Clim Change 5, 1014–1020 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2728
[3] 0Shi, J., Visschers, V. H. M. & Siegrist, M. (2015). Public Perception of Climate Change: The Importance of Knowledge and Cultural Worldviews. Risk Analysis, 35(12), 2183–2201. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.12406
I think you highlighted an important point we all were ignoring a bit in our discussions. In general, we in developed countries have the privilege of thinking about climate change from a high-level perspective. I guess starting, at least in Germany, with the voice of the laypeople is a good first attempt. However, we need this on the global level. For example, the regional climate models perform better in the northern hemisphere than in the global south. There are more prominent problems for large parts of the world’s population. I think this is clearly reflected in the 17 UN sustainable development goals. We need more awareness that the climate action goal affects all the other sustainable development goals. In the end, globally, rich people need to pay the bill. Otherwise, the poor suffer from the climate change the rich have caused.
Excellent post, Yuting. We will take this on for our future classes, and the role of lay people (or citizens) will by no means by easier to play than any of the others.
Still, the question of how to broadly engage citizens in climate science and policy remains. Is a citizen assembly a suitable answer, as proposed by climate movements such as Extinction Rebellion? But how then can we reconcile bottom-up-decision making of the assembly with the ambitious decarbonisation agenda of the movement? What can we learn from transdisciplinary projects in this regard? For an instructive example, see Anita Engels’ research and practice project “Klimafreundliches Lokstedt”, https://www.hamburg.de/klimalokstedt.
Lokstedt is not exactly a quartier as imagined by you, Yuting. It is mostly high-income, academic and green. However, for a start, results from this project can inform our quest for broadly inclusive participatory approaches.
Great post! The voices of the lay people are often ignored and overlooked. The question is how can we reach out to low-income communities and raise their awareness? Since issues like food security, health, income, etc. are often far more important than climate change for low-income communities, it is hard to attract their interests. Many societal issues are related to climate change. I think linking these issues with climate change and communicating this information to low-income communities is important to promote climate awareness.