I’m certainly not the first person to say that media has enormous power – both to reach people far and wide, but also to help us understand, discuss and inspire action on the most important issues facing the world today.

At a time when media is often co-opted and used to spread disinformation, there is a huge need for trusted media to play an educational role in society. And, for me, there’s no bigger problem that media can help us understand than climate change.

For too long, the conversation around climate change has focussed on science, policies and governmental commitments. People’s lived experiences of extreme weather exacerbated by climate change have been missing – especially those who feel the impacts most.

At BBC Media Action, we believe that addressing climate change requires action at all levels of society, and that media has the power to bring together ordinary people, civil society, and leaders to discuss sustainable development that benefits everyone.

Our Indonesia project aims to do exactly that.

Indonesia is one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas producers, with the vast majority of emissions stemming from forest destruction and degradation. The Government has pledged to reduce these emissions; having an engaged public that cares about their forests and holds their leaders to account will help ensure these green commitments are fulfilled.

From our previous work in Bangladesh and Cambodia, we know that media can inform and educate audiences affected by changing weather, inspire individuals and communities to take action to protect their lives and livelihoods, and prompt governments to respond with policies for more sustainable development.

Our challenge in Indonesia is to engage an audience which doesn’t currently feel close to the problem: young people.

Around the world, we’ve seen young people lead the way when it comes to taking action on climate. Youth will make up an estimated 44% of Indonesia’s population by 2030, and there are encouraging signs that they could follow that path too. But our initial research shows us that this largely urban population doesn’t connect with forests or understand how deforestation affects their daily lives. They also don’t know how they can get involved.

Our first task will be to grab their attention – young Indonesians are huge consumers of social media, particularly on mobile. So our project will be ‘digital first’, challenging us to create high-quality, viral content that can cut through a sea of competing information to inform, entertain and inspire young audiences about their environment and the future of their planet.

To do this, we believe a sense of identity is key. Young Indonesians care about what their peers think about them and crave their respect. If we can create a culture of “green kudos” among friendship groups, and make it ‘cool’ to care about the forests, we could spark a generation of young Indonesians who actively engage with their leaders on sustainable development.

This engagement cannot be tokenistic, which is why we’ll be backing up our digital content with a high-quality TV discussion programme and a challenge-style reality TV show. These will provide young people with the tools to understand how climate-related issues, such as air pollution and water security, affect their lives, and how they can engage with leaders on these issues.

Overall, we know this is a formidable task. But we also know from our charity’s work over the last 20 years that trusted media provide space for constructive public participation and debate – something which is much needed when it comes to climate change.

People need to be at the heart of the response to climate change. By encouraging people to work together, media really can change the world for the better.

--

Ankur Garg is Country Director for BBC Media Action Indonesia.

Our work in Indonesia is funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

Like many Cambodians, I’m noticing changes in the weather in my country. The temperature is getting hotter, floods and storms are happening more frequently, and our dry season is longer than ever before.

With 75% of the population living in rural areas and relying on farming or fishing to make a living, these weather changes are already having a big impact on people’s lives and livelihoods.

I helped conduct BBC Media Action’s newly-published research exploring how people across Cambodia are experiencing these weather changes, and whether or not they’re doing anything about them. The report outlines priority audiences, the challenges they are facing in responding to climate change, and tips for how media professionals can communicate climate issues to them more effectively.

We interviewed 1660 people across five regions of Cambodia, and conducted in-depth community discussions. Most people (85%) who we surveyed felt that the weather changes could be having an effect on their health. When I visited Anlong Raing community in the Tonle Sap region, for instance, many people told me they thought their children had been getting diarrhoea more often, and in some cases more serious diseases like Typhoid.

People also felt that weather changes were affecting their income (81%), and what’s more, we discovered that rather than take simple steps such as changing their farming methods, people were more likely to make big life changes in order to get by - 33% said they had changed their job as a result.

Transforming lives through TV

That’s where our brand new TV documentary series – Don’t Wait For Rain – comes in. Informed by our research, the show aims to improve knowledge of climate risks and encourage Cambodians to make easy and affordable changes to become more resilient to the changing climate.

We filmed in locations across Cambodia to showcase the real weather issues people are facing – from flash flooding in the mountainous area of Kampong Speu province to lower fishing yields in the Tonle Sap.

Providing role models to encourage action

For me, one of our most interesting findings is that there is often a social barrier to adapting to climate change. In our survey, 37% of respondents said that they weren’t responding to climate change due to being fearful of discussing actions with others, and 35% said that it didn’t fit with their religious beliefs or community culture.

This was an important insight which we reported to the TV production team. We knew that trust would be a key factor when helping people adapt to new techniques, and that audiences would need to see people they could relate to in the show adapting successfully to be encouraged to try it out for themselves.

That’s why in each episode we pair up an ‘impact’ community struggling to cope with the weather with local experts who have overcome climate challenges.

For example, in one episode, audiences see a female farmer called Ming Mao who lives in Central Cambodia. Ming Mao felt helpless when all of her crops were washed away by flood waters, an increasingly common risk in her region. We paired her with a local expert who teaches her how to build a raised vegetable garden to grow food above flood levels. When she’s revisited later in the episode after another flooding, Ming Mao’s new garden has remained completely untouched!

A more resilient future

My hope is that Don’t Wait For Rain proves to be a hit with our audiences and helps them to better cope with the weather challenges we’re currently facing, and will face in the future. I also hope that other media organisations will use our research findings to tailor their own communications, helping even more Cambodians to adapt.

At the very least, I believe the show will prompt awareness of these weather changes and lead to families and communities questioning what more they could do to prepare for further unpredictability. But of course, what I really want is for people to take action!

--

Khuon Chandore is the former Research Manager for BBC Media Action Cambodia.

Our factual TV series Don’t Wait For Rain is on air nationally in Cambodia from late February until May 2019. The show is part of our Neighbours Together project, funded by Sida, which also includes outreach activities and social media.

To discover more about how people from other countries in Asia are experiencing climate change, check out our Data Portal where you can find further data from our Climate Asia series.

When I was invited to speak on a panel at a UN conference on climate change in Bonn, Germany, I wasn't sure what to expect. I envisioned a large, dimly lit amphitheatre filled with diplomats in dark suits, whispering to their colleagues between reading their official, pre-prepared statements out loud.

I was pleasantly surprised. I was there to speak at the 2^nd Dialogue of Article 6 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While that may sound terribly formal and bureaucratic, it was anything but.

Article 6 is all about how best to promote public awareness, public participation and public access to information around climate change – in other words, how to communicate climate change effectively.

The Dialogue provides a regular forum for stakeholders – government and global civil society representatives alike – to exchange ideas and experiences regarding the implementation of Article 6.

And a dialogue it was. An informal, personal tone was immediately set by the Chair of our panel, Paul Watkinson, who is co-facilitator of the 2

^nd

Dialogue. He began by encouraging us to have a real conversation – rather than a series of positions – and to avoid jargon. He also asked country representatives to use their first names, not their countries, when speaking.

Above all, he reminded us that Article 6 is really about understanding the effect of communication on people’s lives. The discussion that ensued centred very much on sharing good practice on climate change communication – what’s worked for different governments and NGOs as well as what challenges they've faced and how we could learn from each other.

There were several young panellists who talked about how to mobilise young people to address the challenge of climate change, whether through peer-to-peer meetings of university students across the globe, social media, or through video competitions.

Representatives from the governments of Africa, Asia and Latin America showcased innovative techniques for promoting understanding of climate change such as education programmes aimed at young children that use music, or engaging the private sector to provide incentives for things like rain water harvesting.

I was there to speak about the role of media and communication in facilitating climate change adaptation – how people can lower the risks posed by the consequences of climatic changes - drawing on our new policy briefing From the ground up: Changing the conversation about climate change.

The policy briefing uses data from BBC Media Action’s Climate Asia project to underscore how climate change is perceived by those hardest hit by changes in temperature, rainfall and extreme weather and its impact on their daily lives: their income, their health and their livelihoods.

 

I emphasised how important it is to build an evidence base around these threats to food, water and energy security and suggested how media and communication can be usefully deployed to help communities build resilience to them.

I was really pleased to see how much the central thrust of our findings was echoed in some of the comments made around the room.

Saleemul Huq from the International Institute for Environment and Development pointed out that we don’t need to present the developing world as victims. He referenced some of the major successes the government, media and non-governmental organisations in his native Bangladesh have had in building climate change awareness and adaptation, and the need to disseminate and learn from these solutions.

A representative from Ghana, seated in the audience, talked about how much we can learn from the health sector in terms of marshalling media and communication to climate change adaptation strategies.

A panellist representing the St Lucia government, Crispin D’Auvergne, noted the importance of framing climate change initiatives in a way that address people’s everyday concerns – such as their health or jobs – rather than ‘climate change’ as an abstract, scientific issue. 

Reacting to the different speakers around the room, the panel chair Paul Watkinson repeatedly emphasised the need to keep the focus on adaptation and vulnerable populations.

As he noted when wrapping up the session, “This is about people.” I could not agree more.

 

Related links

BBC Media Action policy briefing:From the ground up: Changing the conversation about climate change 

Climate Asia data portal – explore the research project’s findings

BBC Media Action’s resilience work

Follow BBC Media Action on Twitter and Facebook

Go back to BBC Media Action

This week the Climate Asia team are travelling to Warsaw where negotiators from around 190 countries are meeting to try to advance steps towards a global climate agreement.

It's the 19^th annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) and the latest opportunity for us to share the findings of our research project which paints a picture of how people are living and dealing with climate change in seven Asian countries.  

Over the past month, our team has met with media, civil society organisations, governments, businesses and academics across Asia to show them how they could know their audiences better and improve the way climate change is communicated. 

We've been fascinated to see how people are responding to our findings and what they plan to use them for.

 

In our research we not only found that people had noticed changes in temperature, rainfall and extreme weather, but that many were already taking action.

Saleemul Huq, Executive Director of Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, emphasised the importance of this focus on action: "This survey has done us a great service in providing the voices of the poor. This issue is no longer about people’s vulnerability but how they are taking action," he said.

Abetnego Tarigan from Indonesia's oldest and largest environmental advocacy group WALHI, also saw in our data an opportunity to change the conversation about climate change in his country.

Instead of just concentrating on how to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, he said the Climate Asia findings threw into focus the issue of how people adapt to changes in climate.

“I should admit, in Indonesia discussion on adaptation is limited,” he said. “These research results bring us back to the fact that we should be expanding our talk beyond mitigation.”

Duong Thi Thu Huong, a media expert in Vietnam, told us she was excited about the possibility of examining more of the data herself, saying:

“I can see the potential for additional data analysis in order to understand in more detail different target audiences of climate change communication in the future.”

The Antenna Foundation in Nepal, meanwhile, is already planning to use the data to target and reach audiences: "The survey data is comprehensive,” they told us, “and this will help prepare communication materials for targeted communities."

Our data is just the beginning of the story - by sharing it with a global audience at events such as COP2013, we hope it will inspire new opportunities to communicate with people across Asia, to inspire more action and improve people’s live as they respond and adapt to climate change.

Related links

Climate Asia data portal – explore the data and download a communication guide

Climate Asia blogs

Follow BBC Media Action on Twitter and Facebook

Go back to BBC Media Action

Listening to people's everyday experiences is at the heart of the Climate Asia research project, the largest ever study into how people in seven Asian countries live and deal with climate change. So it was no surprise to me that last month I found myself in a remote Indian village doing – yes, you've guessed it – more listening. 

Iwas in the tiny village of Balikuda on the coast of Odisha to continue the training of non-governmental organisations which we've rolled out in India after launching our findings last month. I had travelled to the village with a local NGO calledRegional Centre for Development Cooperation (RCDC) and we were there to carry out what we called a 'co-creation session'.

This meant that instead of focusing purely on improving the skills of the NGO's communicators, we concentrated on gathering insights from the audience and how these can be used to shape more effective climate change communication projects to support them.

Communication cards

To do this, we had come armed with a deck of cards to get people talking. Part of the Climate Asia toolkit which can be downloaded here, they come in five categories: themes, objectives, audiences, partners, formats and channels. 

So, for example, if an NGO wanted to find out the priority issues facing a community, they would hand over the cards – with options ranging from 'education' to 'livelihoods' – and ask them to pick the top three or arrange them in order of importance.

The insights gained from the various combinations of the cards can help us understand the aspirations and needs of communities with whom we work and avoid the top-down approach that all too often marks climate change communications. The approach also works to also break down the concept of 'climate change' into simpler elements, such as rain, forests, agriculture, flood, drought etc. 

Responding to past natural disasters

In Balikuda, the mostly female group we spoke to were initially reticent to give their opinions.

But when given the cards, they told us they felt more 'in charge'of the conversation and started to give very animated and nuanced answers. 

The villagers of Balikuda know all too well the cost of natural disasters. Located only 5k from the coast, Balikuda was devastated by the Odisha Super cyclone of 1999 which decimated land and livelihoods and left over 15,000 dead.

Thanks to the painstaking efforts of the village community and RCDC, the village had successfully rebuilt itself on a more resilient basis. They had diversified their livelihoods so they wouldn't be so reliant on one source of income; created disaster reduction and response teams; planned evacuation strategies and increased their general awareness of disasters and what it means to be more resilient. 

Using the cards, the group quickly identified the top five areas where they needed information so they could improve their lives; water, health, forests, disasters and methods to improve existing livelihoods and agriculture.

Their choices reflected the findings of our Climate Asia research in the state which found that 23% of those surveyed in Odisha worry about not having enough drinking water and 29% fear not having enough food. (For more detail on our findings in Odisha and in the other seven countries in which we conducted over 33,000 interviews, visit our data portal.)

Preferred channels

The group then matched each of the five priorities with the formats and channels they preferred, coming up with some great ideas. 

Some women suggested that information about health could best be delivered through storylines in their favourite soap opera.

Other members of the group, meanwhile, said a toll-free phone service from the Department of Agriculture would be a perfect way of getting hold of information about best farming practices and weather information about when to sow or reap for example.

 

And they had some very strong opinions about what worked best. In terms of better agricultural practices, the women commented vociferously that they preferred watching films or documentaries featuring examples from other villages and told us that this is because they only trust fellow farmers.

When it came to disasters, they chose a mixture of what is called 'on-ground activations' (street theatre, community discussion, community screenings and posters/pamphlets) before disasters strike and then mass media (including information on mobile) for dealing with the aftermath.

Most trusted sources

The women also identified certain institutions as being most trustworthy: mass media (TV and Radio) and local NGOs were perceived to be the most trusted sources. They also had faith in their local governments when it came to information on a few specific issues such as disasters and health.

One woman commented: "Official institutions play a greater role in the domain of health. We cannot trust any pamphlet handed out by any and every one. Similarly in the face of a disaster we cannot evacuate unless a trusted media source of governmental source tells us to."

Indeed, as a result of this observation, the group came up with their own solution to how information about emergencies should be communicated to them. "The state government should set up a service which calls the gram panchayat (village level government) or maybe even all of us on our mobile phones so that we know to respond in time," they said.  

Emergency response

The sad irony was that only 12 days after we were discussing disaster response in Balikuda, Cyclone Phailin – the strongest tropical storm to hit India in more than a decade – slammed into Odisha.   

Thankfully, the death toll remained low thanks to an evacuation effort that saw 900,0000 Odisha residents moved into emergency shelters. But the massive storm has caused widespread flooding, destroyed crops and made more than a half a million people homeless.

In Balikuda, the lessons learned from the cyclone in 1999 combined with NGO support helped the villagers respond. Suresh Bisoyi, the director of field operations for RCDC, told me, "The village disaster reduction task force worked well and the mock-drills and training were used. Although we were a little low on resources and some people refused to evacuate their homes, people came together to deal with Phailin."

Now the hard work to rebuild homes and livelihoods is beginning in Balikuda. And if our session helps that hard work to be more effective and responsive to the villagers' needs, it'll be worth it.

 

Related links

Climate Asia data portal

Resources on the Climate Asia data portal

Follow BBC Media Action on Twitter and Facebook

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"Every year there is a landslide and big rocks roll down to our village. But what can we do?  We cannot leave our village. The only option is to run whenever there is a landslide.”

So spoke a woman in Lupra, a village in the mountainous district of Mustang in Nepal which I visited earlier this year. I was in her village to run a community assessment for the Climate Asia project, a research and communications project that aims to understand people perceptions, experiences and responses to climate change to inform communication activities and programmes that can help them.

With a heartbreaking air of helplessness, the woman told me how the villagers have to cope with landslides and floods every year. She told me they’re also very afraid of “glacier lake outburst floods” (GLOFs), which could sweep away their homes at any time.  The floods, she said, were increasing because of the ice melting on the mountains.

I had many conversations like this during the project. And every time I would ask myself how our project could help people like her.

 

Hunger for information

During my discussions with the villagers, I found that they were hugely interested in the research and really wanted information about how to cope with their situation.

Using their own money, the village had adapted to their changing environment already, building pipes to bring water up to their village and small water collection tanks, in addition to strengthening their flood defences.

But I found out the villagers just didn’t know how to tackle such large-scale landslides and flooding. Similarly, our research found that across Nepal, 59% of people felt that crop production had decreased as a result of changes in climate and most were trying to cope but struggling. From the 2,400 people we surveyed in Nepal, we built up a picture of a nation of people who are trying to adapt to the changes they experience, but finding it very difficult.

Knowing your audience

After two years of talking to people like the villagers in Lupra and writing reports, we launched our findings this week in Kathmandu.

As we presented our results in front of non-governmental organisations, academics and media professionals, I couldn’t help but remember the despair and demand for information I encountered in Lupro and thought, will people really able to understand their predicament and be able to respond?

Thankfully, my fears were quickly abated and I will always remember our launch day as a special and positive moment.

Not only did lots of people attend the launch but they showed a lot of interest in our findings and how these can help them to support people. There was a very positive response and an interest in using not only our data but also the toolkits we created to help organisations, government and media design communications.

While there's a long way to go, I'm hopeful that villages like Lupra won’t feel as helpless as before.

 

Related links

Climate Asia data portal

Nepal report

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Living research

We wanted to make sure our research could be tailored to different organisations’ needs and does not just sit on a shelf.  Research that is not used is dead research and we want to do justice to the people who have shared their stories and told us they need a lot more help.

That's why we are launching the project’s findings one country at a time around the region, holding sessions with the individuals and organisations best placed to use our tools to support those at the front line of climate change. These include governments, media houses and NGOs as well donors and the private sector.

We’ve encouraged these stakeholders to know their own audiences to better to meet their needs, which is the ethos behind Climate Asia. However, to do this properly we first needed to understand our own audiences for our work.

Beginning in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, recently dubbed the ‘adaptation capital of the world’, our approach was to run a workshop drawing on practitioners' own experiences of the interventions but using our findings and insights to tackle barriers to taking action. 

The workshop resulted in some lovely creative ideas for programming, such as a soap opera about migration for women in slums. With over 70 different organisations in the room there was a genuine sense of excitement about what our data and communication could bring to an already thriving sector.

Delhi bound

And yesterday, as we launched in Delhi, we knew India would be a tough audience to impress – presentations on early findings had been met with “Tell us something new!” a number of times. So we knew we had to do something a bit different.

Our top-line finding was a challenge to the climate-change communication sector in the country: “Indians are the least willing and able to respond to climate change.” 

We also hosted a debate on some of our key findings with leading figures such as Vikram Chandra, CEO of major network NDTV, Navroz Dubash, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and well known youth activist, Vimlendu Jha.

And we had a very distinguished keynote speaker in Dr R.K. Pachauri, the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This time the audience was challenging, engaged and interested to learn more about our products, methodology and plans for what happens next – in short, it was everything we had hoped for.

We felt a real appetite in the room for a new language and approach to communicating on climate change in India, and a sense that some of the sector’s leaders recognise this is something we can bring to the table.

Next week we launch in Kathmandu where we will present our findings to a new audience with new priorities. But as in Bangladesh and India, we’ll work to make sure they find our products just as relevant and useful.

 

Related links

Climate Asia data portal

India report (PDF) 

Bangladesh report (PDF)

Follow BBC Media Action on Twitter and Facebook  and follow Climate Asia on Twitter

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"Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh and Gulshan and Banani is the capital district of Dhaka, so people come here for higher chance of getting job."

This was the reason given by one middle-aged man for migrating to the Korail slum which fringes Gulshan and Banani, one of Dhaka's most affluent areas.

We asked him to share his experience as part of a community assessment for our project, Climate Asia, which aims to understand people's daily experience of climate change on the ground and what information they need.

Migrant workers

Korail slum is home to over 40,000 people who have migrated from all over Bangladesh to find work. Some have had to leave their villages due to river erosion and others due to famine. People choose Korail for the job prospects and the low cost of living. One interviewee said, "You will not find a 2000 Taka (about 17 GBP) room rent anywhere [else] in Bangladesh."Most men in Korail work as day labourers. The women work in the garment industry or as servants in the nearby houses of Gulshan and Banani.

The world over slum-dwellers live in difficult, cramped and insanitary conditions, and it's no different in Korail. Residents co-exist in tightly packed houses; many rent single rooms in what are no more than tin sheds. Most households have illegal gas, electricity and water connections, for which people pay rates to middlemen rather than the government. The roads are so narrow that the slum dwellers can't use any kind of vehicle to get around, and the fire brigades find it hard to get through in an emergency. People live under constant threat of eviction.

We found many people who said that Korail slum was a toxic place. Residents living nearby have filled Gulshan Lake (which covers the slum from three sides) with garbage. Fish cannot survive and a terrible smell is a constant and unpleasant presence.

Erratic rainfall

Whilst awareness of the term 'climate change' was low among our interviewees, the community was aware of changes in the weather and their surroundings.

Most of the slum dwellers we spoke to felt there had been changes in the climate. They believed that there were only two seasons: summer and winter, although there are traditionally six in Bangladesh.  People thought that there was more rain and that it had become more erratic. One male respondent said, "The season has changed, it doesn't come when it is supposed to."

Some people felt that pollution from vehicles and even the melting of the polar ice caps were causing the changes in weather, but most felt that it was down to the wish of Allah and that they had nothing to do with these changes.

Reaching people

We also learned the way in which media plays a part in people’s everyday lives. Some households, despite the basic conditions, have managed to rig up satellite TV, other residents gather in tea stalls to watch TV together. Our research found that the women in Korail liked to watch TV serials and movies whereas the men preferred to watch the news. Very few people listened to the radio and read newspapers, but most use mobile phones.

We have taken what we have learned in Korail slum, and another 39 community assessments across seven countries, to build up a picture of how individual communities are experiencing changes in climate. They have taught us how they understand climate change and the ways in which we can reach them.

We will use this information to explore how communication could be most useful to communities in responding to changes in climate and crucially, how this can work best within the structures of community life.

More than 30,000 people were interviewed for the Climate Asia project across seven countries - Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam  in the region's largest ever public investigation of its kind.

The project will launch a series of tools, including research reports and an interactive data portal, in September 2013, which will allow users to explore research data and develop communication to meet public needs.

Related links

Go back to BBC Media Action

Climate Asia

BBC Media Action's work in Bangladesh

 

In the village of Mithekhali in another part of southern Bangladesh, I've seen a cow in its dying moments, starving because the salinity of the soil means grass cannot grow. People told me that without their cows, they can't plough their land. 

In northern Bangladesh, I spoke to another man who had already been forced to give up his trade – this time as a fishermen - and become a labourer.  Several years of drought had seen the rivers he fished dry up and the fish stocks plummet. 

What's clear from our research across seven countries in Asia is that people don’t know what climate change is, what it means, or how it happens, but they feel it in their day-to-day lives.

In Bangladesh, we have just finished a nationally representative survey of 3600 people. This has shown that people perceive decreases in agricultural productivity (40%) and are feeling that changes in climate are having an impact on their livelihoods (74%).

Our challenge is now to give some traction to these findings. As part of the Climate Asia project, we're building an online data portal which will help people who are communicating about such topics to audiences like the farmers and fishermen. Using this portal, they will be able to find and generate information about their audiences that is useful in targeting and creating effective communications.

Our plan is to launch the full findings, reports and data portal in September 2013. 

Related Links

From the BBC Media Action blog:

How do you explain climate change to a taxi driver?

Know your audience 

Climate Asia

BBC Media Action’s work on resilience and humanitarian response 

Go back to BBC Media Action

"How do you explain climate change to a taxi driver?"

This was our question to a panel of international journalists, as we led the opening session of the second annual climate communications day at the UN climate change talks in Doha. 

It wasn't a gimmick. We genuinely want to know.

Our research for BBC Media Action’s communications project Climate Asia has introduced us to all kinds of audiences. From the policy maker to the journalist to the driver taking us to our next focus group, each person has a different understanding of climate change and some find this term difficult to link up with their own experiences. In the course of nine months, Climate Asia has involved us talking to more than 30,000 people in seven Asian countries to understand how people experience, understand and are responding to an often changing environment. 

"When I talk to people about climate change in Bangladesh, what they really want to talk about is water and sanitation," said Lisa Friedman of Climate Wire. "We should stop making people emblematic of climate change. Our job is to write about specific audiences and the nuances of their needs." 

"(The term) 'climate change' is so freaking boring," said another presenter later that day, whose name I will withhold as I know he said this to make a point – and we do get his point – that 'climate' terminology can sometimes get in the way of what we really want to talk about.

As we presented Climate Asia to our audience of journalists, researchers, scientists and communicators, we used the story of Suraiya, a young mother living in a Dhaka slum, whose photograph was used in global report on climate change.

We wanted to turn the tables and stress the importance of thinking about her as an individual with her own unique set of challenges and her own lived experience rather than as a victim or as an illustration. We wanted to stress the importance of taking into account her individual needs, her own perceptions of how she is experiencing the consequences of climate change and the unique things she can tell us about herself: her values, whom she trusts and even how she likes soap operas on TV.

There was a consensus that we need to provide people with access to relevant information on climate change. "Climate information is as important as health information," one panellist stated and the need to communicate more effectively was stressed throughout the day. 

But it seems, when it comes to climate change, not a lot of time has gone into thinking about how to present this information to any particular group or target audience.

It was reassuring to hear questions from people who wanted to know more about how they could make the issues surrounding climate change digestible for their audience.

"How do I convince journalists to write about my research?" asked one scientist. "Keep it simple, keep it short, keep it locally relevant" came the succinct response from a journalist.

This echoes what some media professionals have told us in Asia and it shows us that there is a space for Climate Asia research in helping many actors develop communications. 

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Related links

From the BBC Media Action blog: 

Know your audience: the Climate Asia team's challenge to attendees at the UN climate change conference in Doha

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As the world's media and policymakers descend once again on the annual UN climate change conference, BBC Media Action’s Climate Asia project is challenging those covering the event to 'know your audience'. At first sight, it might seem too simplistic a challenge. But let me explain. 

Most media outlets know how to cover the big political negotiations about climate change, the natural disasters linked to it and the science behind it. But when it comes to reporting this global issue on a local and day-to-day basis, they are on less firm ground. This is partly down to the will of editors to cover the issue, but also the way the subject is presented. All too often the coverage focuses on just the science or the politics and not on the people most affected. 

The reality for many of those affected by a changing environment, in Asia at least, is that the term 'climate change' means very little at all. To quote a charity organisation in Bangladesh to whom we spoke recently: "Most people don’t understand the term 'climate change' or its causes. But they feel its impact."

What's clear is that the efforts by media, governments and NGOs to explain climate change to the audiences most affected by it are clearly not working.

This echoes much of what we are learning from Climate Asia, the most comprehensive body of research in the region to date about people's experiences of their changing environment. More than 30,000 interviews across seven countries have already taken place. 

Although it's early days in our analysis, it's already apparent that people's priorities are not about understanding what climate change is or the negotiations around it, important though those are. 

Rather, they're more concerned about how they’ll be able to secure enough food, drinking water and power to respond to increasingly erratic weather. It's about daily survival, the effect on incomes, the safety of their houses, the health and future of their families.  

With so much at stake, climate change as a 'concept' offers very little to the people most affected by it. In fact, we are increasingly wondering whether it should be used at all in communications that help people to respond to changes in the environment.

Instead, we think a greater focus on the 'lived experiences' of those affected by a changing climate, with information and discussion about the available solutions, would offer a genuine opportunity for the media to tell a more compelling story – and, most importantly, provide the information people need.

That's why we are urging the media and beyond to 'know their audience' and to work with us to think about how to serve them better. 

To find out more about some of the early insights from our survey and join in the discussion, follow us on twitter #CComms Day or if you're in Doha, come to the Climate Communications Day, New Approaches, New Audiences on Tuesday 4 December at Northwestern University in Qatar .

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Climate Asia: blogs and case studies

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I've been working for BBC Media Action for eight weeks. In my first week, I started work on the Climate Asia survey which is taking place across seven countries with a combined population of 3.4 billion people.

Before I knew it, these surveys were being piloted in four Asian countries: Bangladesh, Indonesia, India and Pakistan. As information started to feed back to the team in London, I became immersed in detail. Questionnaire design across this many countries is shaped by multiple, and sometimes surprising, cultural differences.

One of the things we want to understand through the Climate Asia project is whether people are likely to change their behaviour to respond to changes in food availability.

One question we asked people is whether they might 'eat less meat' or 'not increase meat consumption'. Confusion around language was immediately noticeable. Our country researcher from Indonesia explained that 'meat'  actually only means red meat but not chicken or fish.

And for me, a Chinese woman living in the UK, eating less meat is an action I would take to deal with the increase of food prices or to keep fit. However, for the people in some countries in Asia, it means something different. "Eating and serving meat is considered a sign of upward social mobility," Khadija Zaheer, our researcher in Pakistan, told us. "People cannot afford to eat meat so why would they be thinking of reducing it?"

Asking people to use a scale, from say from 1 to 5, to quantify how they feel about an issue is well understood in many countries. But in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, it took a lot of time to do this, particularly in rural areas. So we simplified the process to a two-step prompt, first asking respondents to choose between 'agree' and 'disagree' and then to choose between 'strongly (dis)agree' and 'slightly (dis)agree'. This way, by simply adapting our approach, we were still able to get people to use the degree of scale we wanted.

Of course nothing is ever simple when it comes to working across seven very different countries. China and Indonesia, for instance, decided they didn’t need this distinction. Why people in one country are happy to make one choice in five, while people in other countries are not is still a mystery to me.

On the other hand some concepts are particularly hard to explain with words so pictures and illustrations have been introduced to explain the concepts and scales. Smiling – or frowning – faces can be used, for example, to capture whether people strongly or slightly agree or disagree.

At the end of our pilot for the survey, nearly 300 pieces of feedback had been recorded. This deeply shaped the questionnaires we used in the formal field work. Suggestions on language, translation, scales, tools, and many more reminded me of how important it is to understand the individual cultural contexts, language, and communication habits in cross-cultural research.

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Climate Asia blog

Elsewhere on BBC Media Action: Asia’s largest climate change survey launched

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Twenty years after the landmark Rio Earth Summit, more than 50,000 people have once again descended on Rio to debate the future of our planet and the people who live on it. Away from the rounds of high-level discussions, BBC Media Action is also hard at work on these issues. The recently launched Climate Asia research project aims to put the everyday experiences of Asian people at the heart of responses to some of the world’s greatest human and environmental challenges.

With a survey of over 25,000 people across seven countries, Climate Asia is the first ever region-wide study into the impact of climate change on people’s lives.

In January the Climate Asia team began work on the first phase of this research and communications project. We conducted a series of in-depth interviews and communications workshops in Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam focusing on the tricky issue of communicating climate issues. Our work so far has featured more than 300 experts and opinion formers from government, civil society, business, academia and the media.

While the Rio summit will feature the language of the global policy elite – a sea of acronyms and targets – our interviewees have highlighted the importance of using language people understand. One way to do so is to talk about problems people experience every day like food security, water scarcity, unpredictable weather, disease and migration. As one Bangladeshi civil society representative noted many people "don’t understand the term 'climate change', or its causes, but they feel the impact of climate change."

Farmers, fishermen and people whose lives are directly impacted by changes in climate were identified as our key potential audience for communications workshops. But rather than scaring people with stories about extreme impacts, participants emphasised the importance of using the media to communicate positive messages centred on the benefits of taking action to improve lives and livelihoods in the face of changing climates.

When asked for good examples of climate change communications, our respondents tended to provide examples of where climate change was related to other issues, including development, disaster preparedness and biodiversity. Others highlighted the importance of linking climate change to existing public priorities, particularly those related to development. This message may be of relevance to our friends in Rio who are currently struggling to unite diverse environmental and social agendas. The task may be tricky but linking these issues may make them easier to communicate.

The Climate Asia team is now using these findings to inform design and implementation of Asia’s largest ever survey of public understandings of climate change. Ultimately we hope to use all of this information to create new communications tools and messages for audiences across Asia. Our goals may not be on as grand a scale as those of sleep-deprived government officials in Brazil, but they are ambitious and we believe that our work can and should complement theirs.

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BBC Media Action's Climate Asia Facebook page

Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development 

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