The electronic press with its 24x7 in your face news channels gave way to the power of the social media – facebook and twitter – that catalysed people’s movements across the country and urged us to join and add our voice to advocate for the issues concerned.

The nature of the reach of this dynamic media has been restricted so far to urban spaces and has been led by the youth. Fuelled by volatile issues concerning the day-to-day lives of mainly the urban middle class, the social movements have been dominated by concerns of governance failures.

Large-scale challenges in the form of environmental disasters face the world today. The results of unsustainable human activity guided by a distorted perspective of development and economic growth has brought the world to a boiling point, which many now know and accept as the impact of climate change phenomena. This is one issue that affects every one of us, directly as well as indirectly. Changes in climate are no longer mere measurements by the meteorological institutes and earth scientists. These are evident in the battles for water, energy and food, in the increasing number of cyclones and flash floods, in the new diseases that are emerging with more resistant vectors, in the disappearing natural habitats of many species causing massive bio-diversity losses. Social media, however, has not yet engaged with the looming concerns of climate change that are affecting lives and livelihoods of millions of people.

It is not that ‘communication’ about climate change is absent. In fact, 2012 has seen a surge of climate change communication initiatives across the world. Many organisations have been working towards collecting and presenting evidence of change, of vulnerabilities of various sections of the society, of possible adaptation models that could mitigate climate change impacts. A scan across communication in the sector tells us that most of the talking is amongst the academic, scientific, corporate and civil society organisations, collecting evidence and informing policy for the required change. Very little communication is with and by communities, both urban as well as rural. Neither the print nor electronic media have initiated public debates on issues of climate change. The politicians are not actively engaged with their urban or rural constituencies regarding concerns of long-term environmental degradation. Planning processes on the ground are not adequately informed by appropriate data and future projections of resources.

There is a need to create a people’s movement for better environmental governance guided by the core principles of sustainable development. Such a movement will require innovative and simple communication with and amongst stakeholders across sectors, strata and levels of community, science and governance. Media of all kinds, especially vernacular will play a large role here. The reach of mobile telephone services into the interiors of rural areas and a growing rural youth population means that social media can be potentially used to engage with rural India too. We need the messages that resonate and bring the distant climate issues to bear on the daily lives in our farms, our schools, our factories, offices and living rooms. We need constructive public discussions on the securities of our livelihoods and lifestyles. We also need environmental governance and actions for combating climate change impacts to become central to political debates as well as election manifestos. We hope that as we go forward in 2013, the power of communication can be harnessed for significant public engagement on the issue, so that informed decisions can be made by policy makers. q