Abstract
In recent years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been collaborating with Indian institutions to organise outreach events. This essay draws on the perspective of participants, speakers and organisers of 17 in-person outreach events conducted across India in 2018 and 2020, to share insights and recommendations for future IPCC events in India and other developing country contexts. The formats analysed in this essay range from panel events with very large public audiences to more focused workshops, meetings and seminars. Target audiences covered both academic and non-academic audiences and included researchers, teachers, students, industry and NGOs. The events, while achieving their main objective of communicating the findings of IPCC reports, also provided a platform for open discussion of localised climate impacts and good practices in adaptation and mitigation. There are, however, notable challenges to public outreach in India, specifically in terms of attracting an adequate number of participants, experts’ availability, communicating to a diverse audience and translation into local languages. The biggest challenge faced by speakers was a lack of knowledge about the number of attendees and the composition of the audience prior to an event. It is our recommendation that future outreach events in India are designed to be interactive, tailored to the regional context and complemented by simplified communication materials. Speakers should be provided with audience information and background prior to the event, and greater reach into rural areas, including school children, could be achieved with material in local languages. Additionally, event organisers often require logistical and operational support to host outreach events.
Highlights
This article is part of the topical collection “Climate Change Communication and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)”, edited by Saffron O’Neill and Roz Pidcock
Participants of the 17 formal IPCC outreach events listed in Table 1 were asked why they chose to attend the event in question
Since these individuals may not have in-depth knowledge of IPCC products compared to IPCC authors, discussions at times tended to deviate away from the formal key messages of IPCC reports to more general local issues
Summary
The IPCC’s Assessment Reports are widely regarded as among the most credible sources of peer-reviewed evidence on climate change, summarising the state of knowledge about the physical science, its potential impacts and options to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions that drive it (Howarth and Painter 2016). As well as engaging the media and policymakers with IPCC findings, these outreach events were intended to provide a platform to listen to a diverse range of voices, including state and non-state actors, about adaptation and mitigation initiatives at local, sectoral, subnational and regional levels. These outreach events were intended to create a dialogue with the public and to satisfy a growing appetite among various social groups for reliable scientific information about the science of climate change and the solutions for addressing it. Insights from separate outreach events conducted for university and school students from various grades starting from middle level to high school level in three Indian cities — Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Chennai — are documented
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