I’ll start by saying I didn’t really engage very much with the climate change meeting in Copenhagen. As such I am not sure how much it can be labelled as a failure? However, it hasn’t got much applause from the media and NGOs so I am going to work on the assumption that most people were rather underwhelmed by the outcome.
What I did follow was the build-up to the event, and the audio-visual and web based materials many INGOs were producing. The video below, commissioned by Greenpeace and made by Roman Rutten is a good example. It is also icily appropriate if you are in the UK at the moment as we are locked down by snow!
Despite Copenhagen being an activist extravaganza of unprecidented proportions, with vast amounts of money pumped into slide shows, videos and snazzy websites, did we come out with anything better for it? Impossible to say. You can’t do controlled experiments on these things.
That isn’t to say campaigning is a waste of time. But there must be lessons to be learnt. One surely is that campaigns, including those using of images, video and the web, no matter how cool and compelling they are, just aren’t as powerful as we like to think they are. And that leads to the second lesson, that when you need majorities to move those in power you have to present your arguments to appeal to them. So much of the material I saw in the build-up to Copenhagen was aimed at capturing the involvement of what I would call the ‘converted’. Not a bad place to start, but I am not sure how relevant the melting glaciers of the Himalayas or flooding villages of Bangladesh are to people in suburban England? So, why did I see more on that than what was going to happen at home?
If you want to show people a global perspective then you need to link it to their world. In development this is done by empathy. In human rights by appealing to a sense of natural justice. And in regard to climate change to people’s wallets. Cynical maybe, but if you can show how a changing environment is going to make people worse off then they may be moved to act. And feel more solidarity to those worse off who are already feeling the bite of changing weather patterns. Just a thought.
Filed under: Campaigning, Video Tagged: | climate change, environment, NGO
