Amplifying Global South Voices in Climate Communication

Atmospheric Tales: Season 5 / Episode 2

Ayesha Tandon (Guest), Pallavi Pant (Interviewer), Shahzad Gani (Host)

[Music]

Shahzad G: Welcome to Atmospheric Tales, a podcast that amplifies stories and experiences related to air pollution and climate change, from around the world.

[Music]

Shahzad G: I’m your host, Shahzad Gani, and welcome to another episode of Atmospheric Tales.

Our guest today is Ayesha Tandon, who is science journalist at Carbon Brief. She previously worked at the United Kingdom Met Office as a Climate Science Communicator. She holds an MSci in Natural Sciences, specialising in Climate Science, from The University of Exeter.

Our interviewer today is Dr Pallavi Pant, who is an air quality researcher, and has worked on issues related to air quality and health in low- and middle-income countries for nearly 15 years. She leads global initiatives at the Health Effects Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Health from University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Welcome to the show, Ayesha and Pallavi!

Pallavi P: Thank you, Shahzad, and welcome, Ayesha; it’s great to have you here.

Ayesha T: Thank you so much, Pallavi; it’s great to be here.

Pallavi P: Amazing! I think I have so many questions for you because I’ve followed your work for a while on, you know, communicating about climate change and also speaking to a number of issues that have been very relevant and very visible in the climate change space; so, really excited to have this opportunity to learn from your work and your perspective on the topic of communications on climate change. And I think the place where I would like to start is just the overall narrative of climate change; I remember when I was a kid, we heard of climate change and in the same breath we heard of polar bears and melting ice, but increasingly, especially in the last 10–15 years, I think that narrative has decidedly started shifting towards people and livelihood and the impacts on those. So, as someone who writes about this very actively, when you’re thinking about general audiences and you’re thinking about making the stories accurate, but also accessible, how do you find that balance, and weave in the stories and the narratives, but also the data and the facts?

Ayesha T: Absolutely, I think that is probably one of the most important questions that me and all of my colleagues have to ask ourselves basically on a daily basis. So, as you said, the narrative around climate change has changed so much in the past couple of decades. I mean, I first heard about climate change for a school project — we were doing a newspaper project, actually, about climate change — and me and my team were given the task of writing a newspaper to explain why climate change is fake. The idea was that everybody was doing two sides of a debate, so there was pro-GM food, anti-GM food, for example. And, climate change was this debate; my team had the ‘climate change is fake’ side of the debate. This would have been in, maybe, 2010; that was my first experience of learning about climate change. The narrative has definitely changed since then. And so my first actual work in climate change was at the UK Met Office; I was working around communications for the government. So, I was in a team called Knowledge Integration, and we were doing a lot of work on translating, we called it ‘translating’, the science of climate change that the scientists were producing, and then disseminating it to the government ministers, and to the general public, and to the Met Office communications team, and trying to find ways to make this interesting and accessible to people who don’t have a lot of time on their hands, and don’t have a lot of capacity to get in depth into the nitty gritty of these stories. And so, it really is about who you’re communicating to; when we were communicating to that audience, it was a lot about policy relevance. So, for example, a new piece of research on flooding might mean that insurance prices are going to change; that’s the thing that policymakers are going to be interested in, and so that’s the aspect of that communication that we were focusing on. Nowadays, I work at a company called Carbon Brief, which is a UK-based climate journalism group, and our audience is kind of academics and other journalists and scientists and also politicians as well — people who already have a bit of an interest in climate change and climate science. And so, we definitely try to err on the side of being very accurate and complete in our coverage; we try to have a lot of data-driven journalism and really focus on letting the data tell stories. And, I think there is sometimes a misconception that when you’re using data to tell stories that it’s not interesting or that it’s not human, and I really, I’m trying to push back against that; I think data-driven stories can be very emotive and very personal, and can bring in individual people. And so, I think we try to use the data as the seed, if you like, as the beginning of the story and then use that to broaden out into them being able to talk about people and, sort of, individual experiences.

Pallavi P: Amazing. Yeah, I think, you know, that shift that you’re talking about in how the communication is done depending on the audiences is so important, and I think, also as scientists, sometimes we’re not thinking about things that way. But one thing that has been interesting — sort of not thinking so much on climate change but — just science, in general, tends to be dynamic, it tends to be ever-changing and ever-evolving, and every day we have new stories and new information and new evidence that’s available to us. I’m sure as someone who writes about these data and these advancements in science, you’re also constantly staying informed about these developments. So as scientists, we tend to write a certain way a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times, scientists write for other scientists and journals and, you know, in that very scholarly language. So how do you think about, you know, how the scientists and researchers can help ensure that you and others like you can translate and communicate that evidence in a helpful way? And, how can the scientific community play a role in ensuring that the communicators and the journalists and the translators can do accurate and concise reporting?

Ayesha T: I mean, that is effectively, has been the cornerstone of my job for the past five years now, is trying to take the science that scientists produce, which is written, as you said, in a very specific and formulaic way, because it has to be, because that’s the way it’s published in journals, right? Taking that and then trying to, as I said before, translate it into something that the general public can actually understand — it’s really hard. As scientists, you are trained to write in such a specific and technical and formulaic way, and it’s really important; you need to write that way so that other scientists can sort of use this universal language of science to understand your research. So definitely, when it comes to writing papers, scientists need to keep doing what they’re doing. I think the shift needs to be that it would be amazing to hear from scientists themselves communicating on other platforms so things like this podcast, for example, or making their own videos or communicating on social media or talking to their friends and their family, and just having those conversations with people and learning what it is that will help connect their research to the issues that people care about on the day-to-day. So for example, if you’re doing work on heat waves, maybe the very specific statistics about how much more intense heat waves are going to get, you know, 10% more intense by the year 2100, maybe that doesn’t mean very much. But if you can say to someone, look, you know, that heat wave we had last year in your house, it got really hot and you felt a lot of intense heat stress — well, that could keep getting worse, and by this specific point, this is how much worse you could feel; it relates it more to the individual person. And so, I think there’s a tendency for the general public to see science as kind of divorced from reality, like scientists sit in their academic scientific bubble, and then the general public sits in their general public bubble, and the two things don’t interlock at all. And I think there’s a lot of work to be done in helping scientists to come across more personable and as people who actually are impacted by these problems in the same way that the rest of us all are. So I mean, I would love to see more things like this, this kind of podcast, and blogs and videos where scientists just have a chance to chat, to talk about themselves and for people to see them more as as individuals with their own lives and stories and interests, rather than just kind of data producing machines, as I think a lot of the general public might be inclined to see scientists as.

Pallavi P: Great! I have a quick follow up. As a scientist, I try and think about what sort of messages and what numbers will move people in where they are and in what they do on a daily basis. And one of the things that I’ve heard from a lot of people who are experts in communication is also that you know general public can be really large so you should try and look for that niche, you know, that group that you can tailor your message towards or for. So, just continuing on the thread that you were just building, that you know scientists are also people and in everyday life you’re dealing with the same issues and struggles as everybody else is — do you have any advice for people that are trying to do science communication and are trying to reach audiences? And how, as scientists, we should think about who we should try and target? Because we obviously, I think, are not trained in the field the same way. And how do we tailor, you know, what is the audience that I should try and get to? Maybe people have already interest in reaching to specific audiences, but that issue of general public at large versus, you know, tailoring it to some kind of a niche audience who may be either more interested in hearing about it, or they’re the people that are more impacted, or, you know, some combination, they’re the decision makers or something else; how can we as scientists think about that better?

Ayesha T: Absolutely. I mean, I think this is kind of the beauty of the fact that there are so many scientists out there from so many different backgrounds and with so many different experiences and different interests in communicating with different people. So for me, for example, I think the people that I connect the most with are often women and are often people of colour, just because of the nature of who I am. And so a lot of my messaging, when I talk to people about climate change, is about the importance of diversity and about inequality, and that kind of thing. And so I’ve naturally found myself gravitating towards the kind of communities where that’s discussed. I think for me the important thing is that I only try to communicate the things I’m genuinely really interested about and that I really think that other people will want to know. I think that’s the beauty of the fact that there are so many different scientists out there with different interests and backgrounds that people can really focus in on what they are interested in.

Pallavi P: If I can just sort of interject — I think you’re making the right point, I think that point is so valid. If you’re communicating about things that you care about, that’s going to come through, and you will find that audience that you’re looking for. And I think I also really like the point you were just making about there being diversity of people and what they care about and what they’re most interested in; so, together as a collective, you can still reach the various audiences without being super data-driven, and saying this age group and people interested in this. So I think that sort of answers what I was looking for. And you know, I actually, I really like what you’re saying about people, you know, speaking with passion about the things that they care about and the things that, you know, they might be able to share more insights on with others. And one thing that I have really appreciated that you’ve done over the last few years at Carbon Brief, has been your work looking at the regional representation in climate change communication. You know, we are almost drowning in data at this point that the impacts of climate change are going to be disproportionate. They are going to impact certain communities around the world, within countries, within regions more. But often those are the communities and those are the people that do not have a voice at the stages where these conversations are being held. And, one number that has really stuck with me is that 1%, less than 1% in fact, of authors among the 100 most cited climate science papers that were published between 2016 and 2020 were from Africa; less than 1% of the authors from a region that is likely going to see some of the biggest impacts of climate change over the next several decades. Can you tell us a little bit more about this research you did and also, knowing this, how does it influence the work that you might do and the ethics in the field around whose voices get platformed and how and where?

Ayesha T: Yes, absolutely. So, this is some work that I did in 2021. So, Carbon Brief, the company where I work, was putting together a feature week on the topic of climate justice. And as you said, there is so much data around the fact that the impacts of climate change are going to be felt by the poor and the marginalised, who often were not responsible for producing the majority of the emissions associated with climate change; and, that was really the crux of this week of content that we were producing. And, I was thinking about whether I might want to write something around that topic; initially, I was thinking about something to do with the impacts of climate change. And then, as I did a bit more digging into all of this literature, I realised that the vast majority of it seems to be referencing regions in the Global South, but was written by academics, often men, from the Global North, and I thought, huh, that’s interesting — I wonder whether the whole research base would be different if it was written by a different group of people. And so I thought, okay, I’m going to look into the 100 most highly cited climate science papers that were published over 2016 to 2020; I’m just going to look at who was in charge of writing them, where were the authors from. So this analysis involved around 1300 authors in the end, as I looked through for these papers; and I found that, as you said, fewer than 1% of authors were from Africa, so yeah, there were 10 people affiliated with institutions in Africa, and 90% of the authors came from the Global North — Europe, North America, Oceania. And, I was definitely expecting there to be an inequality, but I was not expecting it to be so severe. And so, what I then went and did is I spoke to a lot of academics, men and women from the Global North and from the Global South, about how they publish research, why they publish research, the barriers they face in publishing research. And, I wrote this big long analysis and it remains one of my most popular or successful pieces that I’ve written to date because I think it just touched, it touched something with a lot of academics too, I think, about how predatory the publishing system can be and how difficult it can be to get your work into high impact papers, and how naturally, this has just caused a huge skew in who is publishing. And, I think it taught me so much about the importance of diversity; I know diversity is always talked about as this important thing — it’s, you know, there are diversity targets and it’s almost a buzzword these days, diversity. I think diversity is very important, but I’d never thought about why. And I ended up doing a lot of interviews with academics and a lot of them were talking to me about this idea of cultural baggage; so again, going back to this idea, basically, that scientists are all humans — we all have our own interests and biases and socio-cultural baggage, and that’s naturally going to impact the way that we conduct research. So just one small example that I found while writing this piece is that there’s a lot more research on the impacts of climate change in cooler climates in the Global North than warmer climates in the Global South, when we’re looking at quite specific regions, and that’s because people from the Global North will tend to study the things that they are interested in, which is how does climate change impact them? And so I just thought, we can’t really have this discussion around climate justice and diversity and inequality without looking at who is producing this huge body of research that many people consider to be objective and unbiased — and that’s just such a fallacy to say that, because science is not, by its very nature, unbiased, because it’s produced by people and people all have opinions and thoughts and feelings; that’s great and we need that, but we need to make sure that we’re getting those opinions and thoughts and feelings from everybody in order to get a representative sample.

Pallavi P: Yeah, totally. And you know, I think this has been a much larger conversation across so many different fields. And what I have really appreciated is, you know, the database that you and Diego Arguedas Ortiz set up, the Global South Climate Database. And for those of you listening in, if you haven’t checked out this database, it is a publicly available searchable database of scientists and experts in the field of climate science, policy, energy, but people that are based in the Global South. So you can find them and you can reach out to them and you can sort of hear about their experiences and expertise. I’m curious, Ayesha, is this, is the idea of this database motivated by your findings from the work you did? And how have people reacted to this database; what has been the response since the time you released it?

Ayesha T: Yes, 100% it was motivated by that research. So after I published that bit of analysis, I think I had to have a good long hard look in the mirror and think about the way that I do journalism. A lot of my work is writing up papers from these high-impact journals and because of that, it meant that the vast majority of scientists I was quoting were men from the Global North and I realised that there was very little I could do to change that. And so I thought, okay, if I’m going to be quoting science produced by people from the Global North, the least I can do is give scientists from the Global South the chance to comment on it, and the chance to be represented in my articles through their opinions, even if it’s not through the actual scientific work they’re putting forth — that’s a good first step I can make. And I found it really hard. I think I was not expecting how far this discrepancy would go, in that scientists from the Global North have published so much research that they have such a big presence online; they have these massive Google Scholar pages, they have very shiny swanky institutional pages for the universities they’re affiliated with, they’re very easy to find. And then, when I would try to go and find a scientist from the Global South and equivalent, I found it really difficult. It’s not that they weren’t there, there are some fantastic scientists available from the Global South — it was just a lot harder to find them. And so I thought, okay, I need to really put some effort in and make some kind of systemic change so I can find these people more easily; I can’t just rely on the fact that I’m going to try really hard, because one day I’m going to get busy, I’m going to get lazy, and I’m not going to keep trying, and I can’t risk that — I need to make some kind of systemic change so I can find these experts from the Global South more easily. And so initially, I just started making this little list on my computer, of Global South experts who I knew, and then I started asking them to suggest their colleagues and their friends, and this list started to grow. And then soon, my colleagues from Carbon Brief were asking for names from my list and I thought, huh, okay, this isn’t a problem that I’m facing alone; everybody in my organization could benefit from this. And then I thought, huh, if everybody in my organization could benefit from this, I bet journalists around the world could really benefit from this. So, that’s when I was introduced to Diego, who works at the Oxford Reuters Climate Journalism Network, and has a fantastic, sort of, network of journalists from all across the Global South who are covering climate change — and I thought, okay, we can work on this project together. And so, we then spent the next few months formalizing this database, and the way it works is that experts from the Global South can self-submit their own names to the database, so it’s all done through self-submission, so people are only on the database if they want to be on it; and then, we verify the responses and put them on the database. And so we launched this database one year ago, a little over a year ago, and it now has more than 1,000 experts from more than 100 countries on it, and it’s still growing. And the response has been absolutely mind-blowing; I was not expecting to get anything like the level of positive feedback I have, but scientists from around the world reach out to me and they say they’ve heard of it, and they use it for finding reviewers for papers or finding collaborations, and editors from journals like Nature are telling me that they’re using it to help find more diverse experts, and journalists from all over the place say they use it for their stories. It feels like it’s really become this really important resource very quickly, and I’m just so happy to think that I’m making some kind of small systemic change that everybody is able to benefit from. So, it’s really exciting, and we’re now looking at trying to get more people onto this database now, and make sure it stays up to date, and it doesn’t start getting out of date quickly; but it’s been fantastic.

Pallavi P: Wow, over a 1,000 people from over a 100 countries; that’s wonderful to hear. And I have to admit, I have used the database as well at times, because of all of the reasons you mentioned — it’s so easy to find people in the Global North, but it just gets harder to find the right people, because there’s wonderful people doing great research, and it’s just harder to get to them. So thank you, to you and Diego, for setting this up; I think it has been a fantastic resource for many, many people. And, I think since you have been working in the field of science journalism, and journalism, the other question that I would love to get your thoughts on is the broader field, looking beyond just climate change, the field of journalism has seen disruption in the last several years — a lot of people are not getting their news from traditional news platforms, and social media and other channels of communication are becoming increasingly important. They’re also becoming important because of the rampant misinformation on these platforms; we could probably count a million examples just from the pandemic, where this became a big issue. But from your viewpoint, how do you see the field evolving, considering the shift and the change that has been happening? And, what do you think comes next — what should we be looking out for?

Ayesha T: Absolutely. I think you’re absolutely right, in that the media landscape is changing very rapidly. So when Carbon Brief actually first started about 10 years ago, we were a fact-checking website; that was the purpose of Carbon Brief, was to right the wrongs of things that politicians and other people were saying, and to sort of try and be that voice of reason. And then, as the years went on, we were not needed for that as much; our fact check kind of died down, and we took up more of this long-form explainer journalism because people weren’t getting their basic facts wrong as much anymore. Instead, people wanted more in-depth information about topics. What’s kind of worrying is that now that we’re in this new era of misinformation and disinformation, we actually are finding that the Carbon Brief fact checks are becoming more important again. It is important for us to be that voice of reason again and to kind of put our mark of authority on, basically, silly things that people say online that then go viral because there’s no one there to fact-check them; and so, we’re having to think really hard about how we proceed in this kind of very rapidly changing media landscape. So, I think a lot of the things that my colleagues and I are noticing, is that people are trusting individuals and brands a lot more. So, for example, Carbon Brief is considered quite a trusted resource, and a lot of our readers really like Carbon Brief content, and more and more are coming for our newsletters, which come just straight/direct from us to them, because it’s like a clear and reliable communication from a source that they trust. Equally, as you said a lot of people are going to social media, which comes with all kinds of pros and cons. On the one side, it’s great because people can find individuals that they trust, and sort of, have a lot of loyalty towards those people; and, that’s great as long as those people are reputable and honest, and don’t promote rampant mis- and dis-information. But, we also know that there’s a huge uptick in people watching videos from YouTubers who are promoting a lot of climate denial and climate skepticism, and these people, it might be a lot easier for them to get locked into this bubble of myths and disinformation if they start to trust the mainstream media less. And so I think, yeah, I honestly, I can’t give you a direct answer about what I think comes next — I wish I could, but I think we just really need to keep an eye on how this media landscape is changing and figure out how we can keep providing reputable journalism. I think a lot of the benefits for me, of working at Carbon Brief, is that my colleagues really are experts; they’ve been in this field for a very long time and they know their stuff, they know how to spot mis and disinformation very quickly, and are quite fast at firing back on it. I think that’s going to become even more important as social media continues to take over the kind of media landscape.

Pallavi P: Thank you so much, Ayesha, for sharing so many insights with us; I think this has been a very fascinating learning process. But, before we close, I do want to hear your personal story — we’re all coming into this with our own interests and motivations, so what inspired you to become a science journalist? What gives you hope? And when you’re not looking at climate and reporting on climate, what do you like to do?

Ayesha T: Absolutely. So I have to say, I never would have imagined myself as a journalist; I never really thought of it as a serious career choice when I was younger. But as a kid, I was always interested in a really wide variety of different things, so writing, but also science, but also sports; I h ad a really wide range of interests. And so, when I went to university, I decided to study Natural Sciences, which is kind of this indecisive person’s route towards studying sciences, but you get to study all of them in your first year, and then you narrow down as you go through. And so I did that but as well, I also had this blog that I wrote on the side, and I got involved in the university newspaper and university journals — I just kept up all this writing, on the side. And basically, I got to my third or fourth year of university, and a lot of my friends were thinking about PhDs, and they were getting really excited about academia and about science, and about these very, very specific niche interests, and I just realized that that wasn’t doing it for me; I wanted something broader. And I realized that maybe my strength lay in communications rather than in actually conducting science; I think I was always the person who could take the very complex topics that my friends were talking about, and then, distill them down into something that other friends who studied other courses, for example, could understand. And, I enjoyed that process; I enjoyed having those conversations with people, working with people to help them understand why the science was so cool. Because don’t get me wrong, I think science is very cool — I just don’t think I have the dedication to do it myself. And so, I think my route to becoming a journalist is kind of luck and chance, and just kind of throwing lots of different things at the wall to see what stuck. So, I did this internship at the UK Met Office in my third year of university, the year between my bachelor’s and my master’s degree, and I was working in this communications role and I loved it. It meant I got to talk to scientists, but I also got to talk to media people, and I got to talk to policymakers, and I got to talk to members of the general public. I just, I got this really good, well-rounded view of all different people’s opinions on the same topic, and I just loved that; I loved that variety and that diversity. And I realized that, this communications role, this is what I wanted to do — finding that connection with people, finding the way to make them care about the things that I think are important. And, I guess, that kind of leads into what gives me hope, is that there are still so many people out there who care so deeply and are fighting the good fight, whether it’s scientists through their research or journalists through their writing and or activists through their campaigning. I think there are so many different strands of society who all come together to tackle this problem and that really does give me a lot of hope. And then, I mean, in my free time — you can’t spend all your time talking and thinking about climate, it can be stressful, and my work sometimes does make me a bit stressed and a bit sad. And for me, exercise is kind of the way that I get around that; so, I play badminton a couple of times a week, I go to a kickboxing gym, and I also dance. I’m actually a classically trained Kathak dancer; it’s a North Indian dance style that I’ve been doing since I was a kid, and so I have a class here in Oxford that I go to occasionally, which I also really enjoy.

Pallavi P: That’s fantastic, and, you know, before I react to anything else you said, I think I have to say, it’s nice to meet a fellow Kathak dancer, because that’s something I did when I was younger and, you know, I haven’t done it in many years, but it’s very nice to always meet people who have trained in Kathak.

Ayesha T: Oh, that’s amazing. That’s brilliant.

Pallavi P: I’m so glad we found that connection. Thank you, Ayesha! This has been fascinating — I really wish we had longer. But a couple of things that I think have really stuck with me, especially from this last piece you said, is so much about the collective, and different people playing a role in that collective, with the scientists, and the journalists, and the activists, and everybody else who’s been a part of this journey. And I’m very glad you found your calling in journalism, and you’ve been doing all this wonderful work; so, thank you for doing that, and we look forward to seeing more of that work; we would love to see the database grow in time, and more and more people use it. So, thanks a lot for joining us today, and for sharing your thoughts and your insights, and hopefully, we’re going to meet someday and do like a little Kathak show-off; that’ll be fun.

Ayesha T: Yes, absolutely. A dance-off; looking forward to it! But yes, thank you for having me; always lovely to meet a fellow Kathak dancer as well — that’s brilliant.

Shahzad G: With that, I would like to thank our guest, Ayesha Tandon, and our interviewer, Dr Pallavi Pant, for joining us on this episode of Atmospheric Tales. Thanks to all our listeners for tuning in; make sure to subscribe and share!