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Learning from climate change communication to expand and improve nutrient communication
Citation:
Canfield, Katherine, K. Mulvaney, AND N. Merrill. Learning from climate change communication to expand and improve nutrient communication. Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) North America, 42nd Annual Meeting, NA, Virtual, November 14 - 18, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
Communicating the impacts of nutrient pollution is difficult for a number of reasons, including 1) the largely nonpoint source nature of pollution; 2) the time and spatial delay between polluting action, impact, and recovery; and 3) the lack of public urgency to address this complex problem. Climate change also has these three characteristics that make it similarly challenging to communicate about. While there is not significant research in how to overcome these communication difficulties for nutrients, the science of climate change communication has researched how to best tackle these difficulties to increase public awareness and mobilize collective action around climate change. This research identifies the evidence-backed practices for effectively communicating about climate change that can be usefully transferred to improve communication about nutrient pollution, and presents some examples of how scientists and communicators can apply these practices.
Description:
Communicating about environmental problems with “slow impacts” has long been a challenge for scientists, public health officials, and science communicators, as a time delay between the problematic action and subsequent consequences dilutes the sense of urgency to act. This is an important challenge for both nutrient and climate change communication. As nutrient pollution continues in marine waters in the United States and globally and impacts worsen, the need for effective nutrient communication is increasing. We hypothesized that the findings from research on climate change communication could provide an important set of evidence-backed practices that could be applied toward improving nutrient communication to tackle these worsening impacts. Using a qualitative coding approach to review the science communication and climate change communication literatures, we identified five recommended practices for climate change communication that are appropriate to transfer to nutrient communication: 1. prioritize two-way communication between the public and communicators, 2. relate to human experience rather than abstract analysis, 3. emphasize local impacts and immediate actions to be taken, 4. define and activate social norms around the problem and urgency of action, and 5. build interdisciplinary collaborations to address science communication training and recognition gaps. These practices share an underlying emphasis on relating the communication to the societal and environmental context and recognizing the assets of all relevant publics and individuals to address the environmental challenge. Recognizing the differences between climate change and impacts of nutrient pollution, we also explore how these environmental problems with delayed impacts demand nuanced strategies for more effective communication and public engagement. Using examples from our own efforts to communicate about excess nutrients on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, we demonstrate how these practices can be applied in navigating the communication of slow impacts in a diversity of settings, including across government agencies. Applying generalizable approaches to successfully communicate about the slow impacts related to nutrient pollution across geographic contexts will help build publics’ understanding and urgency to act on comprehensive management of nutrient pollution, thereby increasing protection of coastal and marine environments.
