Leonie Joubert

Penning a level-headed tale of calamity

How do you tell a story as complex as climate change: where the cause is centuries' worth of pollution, trickling steadily into an ocean of air as vast as the sky above our heads; where the effluent is largely invisible; where the culprits straddle generations; where the victims come decades later? Cape Town hosted scientists and journalists at a conference last month, which was geared towards honing the craft of storytelling in the realm of a shifting climate. Science journalist Leonie Joubert jotted down some of her observations.

Over the airwaves

Climate change is like driving a bus down the highway at 160 km per hour. It's got so much momentum behind it that even if we take the communal foot off the accelerator, the bus is going to keep hurtling down the tarmac for a long, long way… and the message for Africa is that there are many poor and vulnerable communities standing in the path of the oncoming vehicle.

No matter what we do to curb the pollution today - no matter how many light bulbs we change, or coal-fired power stations we allow to cool and stand fallow - these changes will only begin to make a difference in 50 years from now.

How do we tell poor communities about the bus, or about how to step out of the way?

	Mary Robinson, president of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, highlights the link between climate change and human rights, and the role of women in bringing the world's attention to the effects of global warming.

This was one of the questions raised at the conference - particularly since the rural poor are amongst the most vulnerable to the increasingly extreme weather events which will undermine their food and water security, their health and their livelihoods. They are amongst those with the least access to news media.

The key is radio.

Rural radio is Africa's internet, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. It has also been described as the continent's Cinderella medium. It is the single most potent way to get information across the vast geographical barriers which separate the newsroom and the intended audience (poor road infrastructure and considerable distances between printing presses and readers not being the least of these). It traverses illiteracy (you don't have to be able to read in Xhosa to be able to hear in Xhosa) and poverty (you'll find battery operated radios even in the deepest rural homes, before you find a television or newspaper).

But the key is getting the right message across. A dearth of skills, as described by the skills audit done by the South African National Editors Forum in 2003, and low scientific literacy in newsrooms are big hurdles to getting the best information to the poor - and this should include how they should be adapting to the changing world around them.

Advertising is another issue: poor communities, the ones needing this information most, are not the most desirable to advertisers because they don't have the buying power that appeals to advertisers, and are often far removed from the markets where the advertisers would like them to spend their money.

Also, the typically short, sharp news reports of radio are probably not the best way to deliver complex messages around climate change, a community's vulnerability and how they should adapt. Longer "talk show" slots, organised radio debates, or structured educational inserts would probably have greater success.

Getting the story right

The drought which hit the 2006/2007 maize crop in South Africa was regarded as a one-in-40 year event and its impacts were neat and linear: rain dried up, maize yields fell, shortages rippled through the supply chain, pushing up the price of poultry, eggs, red meat and dairy.

The National Agricultural Marketing Council (NAMC) noted a hike in the cost of white maize, from R600 per ton in 2004 to R1 874 per ton by November 2007. In 2006 the NAMC already noted a 7.8 percent increase in the cost of food: maize meal was up by nearly 30 percent, cooking oil by nearly 20 percent, red meat and chicken by 11.8 percent.

The cause and effect are easy to see, and simple to communicate. But the impacts of climate change aren't always this convenient, its stories are often more complex and intertwined.

Consider Ga-Selala, a rural community outside Burgersfort in the Limpopo Province. Researchers from the University of Cape Town's Climate Systems Analysis Group and the Stockholm Environment Institute have spent three years working in the community to understand how climate change plays out here, in an area where municipal services are limited, poverty is high and food security tenuous.

The community tops up its food requirements by growing vegetables in community gardens. But the health of the vegetable gardens depends on how much water they have for irrigation.

Researchers have discovered a complex web of interactions between rainfall and when it falls, how much ground water is replenished, whether there's money in the community to buy fuel to pump up the ground water to the nearby dam, which feeds the stand pipes in the village.

If the water level in the dam drops, community leaders ban irrigation of food gardens, reserving the resource for basic drinking and household needs. This water shortage undermines the village's nutrition and health. And once HIV/AIDS is factored in, people are weaker, less able to tend gardens, and more likely to succumb to water-borne illnesses such as cholera and diarrhea.

Tug on one thread, and the whole web shifts this way. Tug on another, and it shifts the other way.

So much of the media discussion around climate change deals with the politics of emissions reduction (such as global negotiations to set emissions targets), or communicating to the public about how to cut emissions. But the message for Africa needs to be packaged around delivering information that will tell communities both how climate change will impact on them, and how they should adapt to those changes.

The next step is to get African media outlets to engage with issues around climate adaptation, as they realise their role as educator within civil society. For a community like Ga-Selala, for instance, they need to know what potential water shortages or drought stress their gardens might have to endure in the future, so that they can make decisions about switching to more hardy, drought-resistant varieties. The media can facilitate the transfer of this sort of information from the scientific arena to a grassroots community like Ga-Selala. And then that needs to be duplicated across Africa's remote countryside. (END/IPS/08)

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