Journalists and Open Access

This chapter explores the role of open access in promoting climate change adaptation and sustainable development. It reviews global trends of journalists' access to information and specifically discusses Tanzania journalists' access to and use of climate change information. The chapter further assesses the impact of journalists' access to open information resources in adapting to climate change and promote sustainable development. The chapter also discusses the challenges journalists encounter in accessing and using open access information resources. It further recommends solutions to the raised challenges and suggests areas for further research. The chapter concludes by giving insights on major issues of concern on open access.

Promoting Climate Actions: A Cognitive-Constraints Approach

Many Americans do not view climate change as a threat requiring urgent action. Moreover, among U.S. conservatives, higher science literacy is paradoxically associated with higher anthropogenic climate-change skepticism. The present study harnessed the power of two cognitive constraints essential to belief formation and revision to design educational materials that can mitigate these problems. The key role of the coherence and causal-invariance constraints, which map onto two narrative proclivities that anthropologists have identified as universal, predicts that climate-change information embedded in scientific explanations of (indisputable) everyday observations within a coherent personal moral narrative, juxtaposed with reasoners’ typically less coherent explanations, will be more persuasive than climate-change information by itself. An experiment conducted in U.S. states with the highest level of climate skepticism demonstrates that across the political spectrum, conveying science information using materials that leverage these constraints raises both appreciation of science and willingness to take pro-climate actions.

The Relationship between Social Norms, Avoidance, Future Orientation, and Willingness to Engage in Climate Change Advocacy Communications

This study examined factors associated with willingness to engage in communication behaviors related to climate change advocacy. Data were collected as part of an online, longitudinal US study beginning in March 2020. Outcomes included willingness to post materials online, contact state legislators, and talk with peers about climate change. Covariates included climate change-related social norms, avoidance of climate change information, and perceptions of the future impact of climate change. A minority of the 586 respondents (23%) reported regular conversations about climate change, while approximately half of the respondents reported willingness to discuss climate change with peers (58%), post materials online (47%), and contact state legislators (46%). Strong predictors of willingness to engage in each climate change communications behaviors included climate change social norms, not avoiding climate change information, and believing that climate change will have a negative impact on the future. Findings indicate the importance of designing programs to foster increased climate change communications in order to promote community-level climate change advocacy norms.

Trend analyses of regional time series of temperatures and rainfall of the Tapi basin

Climate change information at the scale of basin is vital for planning, development and use of water. The Tapi basin is climatically responsive. Hydrological response of a basin is based mainly on rainfall and temperature. Variations in climate at regional scales impacts fundamental features of our life. Thus, in the present work, trend analyses of regional time series (1971-2004) of minimum, mean, maximum temperatures and rainfallis performed for monthly, annual and seasonal scales for the Tapi basin. Correlogram is utilized for evaluation of dependence of data. Mann-Kendall test and Mann-Kendall test with block bootstrapping are applied for the evaluation of trend significance. Sen’s slope test is applied for the evaluation of trend magnitude. Sequential Mann-Kendall test is applied for assessment of beginning and end of the trend. Statistically significant positive trends are detected in regional annual and winter Tmean time series with their beginning in years 1974 and 1972, respectively.

Bridging the scale gap: obtaining high-resolution stochastic simulations of gridded daily precipitation in a future climate

Climate change impact assessment related to floods, infrastructure networks, and water resource management applications requires realistic simulations of high-resolution gridded precipitation series under a future climate. This paper proposes to produce such simulations by combining a weather generator for high-resolution gridded daily precipitation, trained on a historical observation-based gridded data product, with coarser-scale climate change information obtained using a regional climate model. The climate change information can be added to various components of the weather generator, related to both the probability of precipitation as well as the amount of precipitation on wet days. The information is added in a transparent manner, allowing for an assessment of the plausibility of the added information. In a case study of nine hydrological catchments in central Norway with the study areas covering 1000–5500 km2, daily simulations are obtained on a 1 km grid for a period of 19 years. The method yields simulations with realistic temporal and spatial structures and outperforms empirical quantile delta mapping in terms of marginal performance.

ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND PATTERNS OF FARMERS’/PASTORALISTS’ CONFLICTS IN ZAMFARA STATE, NIGERIA

Struggle over land and scarce resources have resulted in perennial and growing violent conflicts amongst arable crop farmers and cattle herdsmen in various parts of Nigeria. This study analyses the relationship between climate change and patterns of herders-crop farmers’ conflict in Zamfara state, Nigeria. Data for this study were acquired via semi structured questionnaire and Key Informant Interview. Purposeful sampling method was used to select six communities, while 260 farmers and 67 pastoralists were chosen as sample size for the survey based on Krejcie and Morgan’s formula. Descriptive statistics such as percentages, arithmetic mean and Likert rating scale were adopted to analyze the data for the study. Results from the findings indicated that farmers and herders in Zamfara state were within active years of economic and productive age (24 to 44 years). Nearly,75% of both farmers and pastoralists in the study communities professed there is high variability in rainfall pattern and increase in temperature. Three-quarter of the respondents confirmed that the nature of the conflicts was assault involving the use of arms; whereas two-fifth of the respondents affirmed that the conflict occurs during harvest and the planting seasons. The study concluded that climate change is the bane of incessant resource use conflicts in the study area. Thus a clearly formulated government policies and implementation framework that would boost climate change information forecasting and dissemination, adaptive capacity and ranch management will salvage the conflictual relationship subsisting between farmers and herders in the study area

Fostering climate change consensus: The role of intimacy in group discussions

This study examined if creating intimacy in a group discussion is more effective toward reaching consensus about climate change than a focus on information. Participants were randomly assigned to either a group that spent the first part of an online discussion engaging in self-disclosure and focusing on shared values (intimacy condition) or discussing information from an article about climate change (information condition). Afterward, all groups were given the same instructions to try to come to group consensus on their opinions about climate change. Participants in the intimacy condition had higher ratings of social cohesion, group attraction, task interdependence, and collective engagement and lower ratings of ostracism than the information condition. Intimacy groups were more likely to reach consensus, with ostracism and the emotional tone of discussion mediating this effect. Participants were more likely to change their opinion to reflect that climate change is real in the intimacy than information condition.

Social network analysis of climate change discussion on Twitter during COP21

The public is increasingly relying on Twitter for climate change information; however, to date, this social media platform is poorly understood in terms of how climate change information is shared. This study evaluates discussions on Twitter during the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) to elucidate the social media platform’s role in communicating climate change information. For a five-day period, links embedded in a sample of tweets containing “#climatechange” were characterized, Twitter users were classified by the types of links they typically shared, and their degree centralities (the number of connections for each user) were measured. There was little skeptical content across all user categories; however, news links were more likely than non-news to contain content that is skeptical of climate change. Users who typically shared skeptical news links and users who typically shared non-skeptical non-news links exhibited a relatively high number of connections with other users.

Social network analysis of climate change discussion on Twitter during COP21

The public is increasingly relying on Twitter for climate change information; however, to date, this social media platform is poorly understood in terms of how climate change information is shared. This study evaluates discussions on Twitter during the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) to elucidate the social media platform’s role in communicating climate change information. For a five-day period, links embedded in a sample of tweets containing “#climatechange” were characterized, Twitter users were classified by the types of links they typically shared, and their degree centralities (the number of connections for each user) were measured. There was little skeptical content across all user categories; however, news links were more likely than non-news to contain content that is skeptical of climate change. Users who typically shared skeptical news links and users who typically shared non-skeptical non-news links exhibited a relatively high number of connections with other users.

Extension Agents’ Perception on Suitability of Climate Change Information Disseminated to Smallholder Farmers

This study examined gaps in climate information within public agricultural extension in Limpopo Province, South Africa. It assessed extension officers’ climate change perceptions, knowledge and climate education. Lastly, the study examined the extension approaches for overall suitability of climate information disseminated to rural smallholder farmers. The results indicated that participants were predominately male, with tertiary education. Education levels had an influence on exposure to climate education and extension approaches in disseminating agricultural information to farmers. There is a need to retool extension officers in climate change extension work, integrating indigenous knowledge to increase suitability and acceptability of information by smallholder farmers.