On 26 August, a mass of ice and rock broke away from a glacier in northern Nepal, resulting in massive avalanche down the Lende Khola river basin that buried villages, destroyed 32 bridges, and killed more than a thousand people, with dozen still missing. Scientists believe that a warming atmosphere helped trigger the collapse.

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,

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.

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