This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: While people across the globe are experiencing various impacts of climate change, governments and communicators often use top-to-bottom, uniform communication strategies to inform people about climate change. Challenging the assumptions behind these communication approaches, researchers found evidence that people living in different coastal socioecological settings can experience, understand and respond to climate change in different ways, even within broadly similar geographic and socioecological settings.
The findings, published in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management, from the coastal region of Kerala in southern India reveal an important gap between awareness of climate change and scientific understanding of its causes. The researchers studied people's perceptions, beliefs and knowledge about climate change in two coastal regions, one low-lying island and the other a mainland coast. For example, people from Vypin, a low-lying island, expressed concern about sea-level rise, recurrent flooding and land subsidence, while people from the mainland coast of Kozhikode often spoke about declining fish abundance and changes in the size of sardines.
The researchers documented many such accounts, demonstrating that lived experience can provide a detailed understanding of climate change even when people may not use scientific terms to describe it. The study also found that people do not interpret climate change solely through scientific explanations. Participants connected climate change with deforestation, pollution, plastic waste disposal, urbanization and other local environmental changes.
Some also explained climate change through religious and cultural worldviews, including ideas of divine control, punishment or an approaching end of the world. Other misconceptions included the idea that climate change is caused by local environmental issues, such as dumping plastic waste. "These perspectives should not simply be dismissed as ignorance; rather, they reveal how communities make sense of a complex and uncertain phenomenon through culturally embedded ways of understanding the world.
These different understandings are also suggested to influence people's sense of agency," says doctoral researcher P. Afna from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal. Afna also points out that some misconceptions about the causes of climate change may create an inflated sense of responsibility among individuals and local communities, who may believe that changing their own behavior alone can address a problem driven by much larger structural processes.
This can potentially shift attention away from the responsibilities of governments, high-emitting sectors and other powerful actors to provide adaptation support, climate finance and other forms of assistance. The findings also show that climate vulnerability is not experienced uniformly. Participants described concerns ranging from livelihood losses and temporary relocation to threats to homes, education, health and psychological well-being.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
