Think-Tank: Climate change should look beyond image of polar bear
- csrice8
- Jul 5, 2017
- 1 min read
What does climate change look like? For many people, the first – or perhaps only – image that comes to mind is of smokestacks, or polar bears perched on ice floes. “If you go to Google and click on climate change images, you have to go a long way before you hit many images of people,” says Adam Corner, research director at Climate Outreach, an Oxford-based thinktank that aims to boost public engagement on climate change. But climate change already is affecting billions of people around the world, from farmers in Zimbabwe experimenting with new crops to battle drought to grandmothers in India who earn cash selling solar home lighting systems, or children in the United States coping with a longer allergy season.
Getting more of those people-focused images into the media, into NGO campaigns and into other public communications could help more people identify with the problem, see the opportunities and understand the need for action, Corner said. “There’s nothing wrong with polar bears,” he said. “But they’re very distancing images. They identify climate change as something that happens far away where most people’s lives aren’t. They don’t do justice to the richness of the human experience of climate change.” In an effort to widen that narrow view, Corner’s organisation has launched a new portal for climate change images.
Patrick Bouquet