At the same time, the World Meteorological Organization has warned that the El Niño now building may be the strongest since monitoring began four decades ago, with effects reaching well into 2027. Colombia, the country where I currently live, is seeing an unprecedented wave of forest fires, which are believed to be linked to El Niño and are expected to put the food security of many people in the region at risk.

Both events will be explained to the world by a field, that of “climate communication,” that was largely developed by academics in one area of the planet. The field emerged from Northern institutions like the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication (Mason 4C), both in the United States, asking a question that reflects a Global North logic: how do we persuade large and apathetic audiences to care about climate change?

The elephant in the room

In fact, a recent survey of the field found that, of 505 articles in the five journals that produce most climate communication research,

• 93% of authors were affiliated with institutions in the Global North
• 57% of studies examined Northern countries and only 12% looked at the South
• Latin America and Africa each accounted for 1 percent of authors.

The International Panel on the Information Environment calls the equivalent gap in research on climate information integrity “the elephant in the room.”

This is a problem as many of the assumptions behind mainstream climate communication research, while clearly applicable to Northern contexts, do not always to apply to many global South settings, where vulnerability to the effects of climate change is much higher. For instance, much of the field takes for granted dense commercial media markets like those of the US or Canada, reliable connectivity, and audiences whose understanding of and relationship with climate issues might be enhanced by better framing.

In contrast, in strategic ecosystems for global climate stability like the Amazon rainforest region, just 5% to 8% of the region has high rates of connectivity, and climate disruptions such as droughts routinely expose internet cables to the elements, further undermining reliable access. The region also suffers from a lack of public interest media and of fragmented public spheres where dominant media actors are suspected of having links to extractive interests or to political patrons, a situation that undermines the communication rights of people there.

There is also a deeper problem about what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is validated or discredited in media discourses. Western science is analytical, quantitative and transmitted through text, while traditional ecological knowledge – the knowledge with which people in regions like the Amazon engage on a daily basis – is holistic, contextual, and often passed on orally.

As Boaventura de Sousa Santos shows in his book The End of the Cognitive Empire, part of the colonial project entailed rendering Northern knowledge into the world’s default way of describing reality, resulting in the dismissal of other epistemologies. Media practice inherited those hierarchies, with Indigenous people considered newsworthy for their clothing and their spirituality far more often than for their political action or their knowledge of the territory.

Needed: Bottom-up, rights-based approach to climate communication

In this context, we need a new approach to climate communication, an approach that takes a bottom-up perspective and that understands communication as a right.

A number of WACC’s project partners are doing precisely that, only outside the confines of academia.

• In Napo, Ecuador, Radio Ideal, a station part of the community media organization CORAPE, broadcasts long-form live interviews that audiences trust precisely because they hear whole exchanges unedited and know the broadcasters personally. This creates a web of local relationships stronger, though more localized, than anything a commercial media outlet can even aspire to generate.
• In Vaupés, Colombia, a hybrid digital/analogue radio station part of the Grupo COMUNICARTE network, holds local environmental decisions up to public scrutiny – this while transmitting at a third of its licensed power because it cannot afford to repair its transmitter.
• In the Brazilian Amazon, a network of community correspondents from Rede de Noticias da Amazonia counters mining propaganda not by engaging in traditional factchecking but also by debating patiently with its critics and by offer communities essential platforms to fight to protect their rivers and forests.

A bottom-up approach also responds to climate anxiety, an increasingly prevalent feeling among people around the world. To counter hopelessness, we need vibrant, local media that see the issue of climate less as an issue of convincing audiences to care and more as a matter of creating platforms to level the playing field.

Affected communities exercise agency when they are heard and can advance their own solutions. Through local media, people become producers of media rather than passive audiences, which can lead to further action for the common good. This has been the case of two co-producers of an environmental radio magazine at Radio Ideal: one went on to become a national legislator and the other a provincial ombudsperson.

Some of what is needed already exists on paper – it “simply” needs to be implemented. The Escazú Agreement, for example, obliges Latin American states to disseminate environmental information in the languages actually used in a country and in formats people can understand. And at the UN Climate Change Conference COP30, governments signed the first Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change.

What is missing is money and recognition. We at WACC believe that democratic local communication ecosystems are climate stability infrastructure and should be funded as such.

The next decade of climate disasters will be lived mostly in the Majority World. Climate communication was never short of good messages. It was short of local voices. We can work together to transform the field and put these voices at the heart of public conversation.

Top image: Destruction in the wake of the “Himalayan tsunami” that swept through the Bhotekoshi River and Trishuli River corridors in Nepal on 26 August. Dev Kumar Sunuwar/Cultural Survival

Populist right-wing figures like Donald Trump (USA), Nigel Farage (UK), Alice Weidel (Germany) and Santiago Abascal (Spain) have either denied climate change, sought to undermine its importance, or claimed that focusing on it undermines their countries’ prosperity. In doing so, these claims have fueled a narrative that seeks to absolve polluter countries of their historical responsibility for the climate crisis.

These narratives are tempting to follow for many people in Northern countries, many of whom are already dealing with many other issues like the high cost of living or limited access to housing. But that does not make them true.

As leaders from around the world gather in Brazil at the United Nations COP 30 climate summit (Nov 10–21), it is worth remembering that no matter what the Bill Gateses and Tony Blairs of the world say, climate change is and will continue to be a justice issue that requires justice-oriented solutions.

Climate change is a phenomenon caused by historically wealthy industrialized nations, especially in the North, and more recently by large emitters like China and India. However, a lot of its effects, like changing weather patterns and unpredictable droughts and floods, are being felt primarily by communities in South. There is no denying this.

As former Irish President Mary Robinson says: “The most disadvantaged across the world are suffering the effects of climate change. Though these communities have been the least responsible for the emissions causing climate change, they have been, are being, and will be, disproportionately affected because of their already vulnerable geographic locations and their lack of climate resilience.”

Solutions that take a climate justice lens include debt forgiveness, energy justice, and enhanced Indigenous and peasants land rights. From WACC’s perspective of communication rights, in addition to these aforementioned and very relevant demands, the world also needs to pay attention to how communication and information deficits are undermining the fight for climate justice.

These deficits – including limited access to information, a dearth of public interest journalism, a generalized lack of critical media literacy, and undemocratic media structures – mean that the knowledge and ways of thinking and knowing of communities at the forefront of the climate crisis are rarely heard in public debate and are absent in policymaking.

For example, as Naomi Klein notes in This Changes Everything, “Indigenous people might get media attention for their clothes, culture, or spirituality but rarely for their political actions or traditional knowledge… Corporate media often presents Indigenous people as ‘living in the past’ and enjoying undeserved special rights.” This constitutes a serious barrier to the “parity of participation” needed so that communities affected by climate degradation can effectively influence policymaking. These deficits also allow for climate disinformation to go viral and for politicians whose main modus operandi is lying to continue to win elections.

WACC believes that integrating communication and information justice issues into climate justice struggles is essential. While in theory everyone has equal human rights related to communication (access to information, freedom of expression, etc.), in practice the most marginalized people – those who often are the most affected by climate change – face significant economic, political, and cultural barriers to exercise these rights and have their voices not only heard but taken seriously.

In practice, we must tackle these deficits by

• supporting efforts to enable grassroots climate activists and media houses to build connections and trust
• promoting greater access to media, the internet, and ICTs (information and communications technologies) among Indigenous and marginalized communities
• advocating for the allocation of broadcasting licenses to community-based groups affected by climate change
• building the capacity of Indigenous and other grassroots communities to engage with media
• enhancing intercultural dialogue initiatives and promoting Indigenous languages
• supporting grassroots communities to systematize and share traditional ecological knowledge that help theirs and other communities adapt to climate change

WACC will be present at COP30 with a team of grassroots journalists from across the Amazon basin to present the case for communication rights as building blocks of climate justice – because climate change demands that the voices of communities at the forefront of the climate crisis are heard.

Photo: Children take refugee above flood waters in their home in Santa Cruz, Laguna, in the Philippines. Paul Jeffrey/Life on Earth