Thoughts form London

This is what I intended to write last month following an important conference I attended in the Seychelles on disaster management and climate change strategies.

But President Rajapaksa’s pep talk to our diplomatic mission heads made me temporarily abandon the Seychelles confab to deal with some misconceptions and preconceptions that had somehow crept into President Rajapaksa’s address, possibly because he had been misinformed on some aspects of our diplomatic efforts and diplomatic needs.

Perhaps I should put climate change in the back burner again after the abortive two-day effort to revive the peace talks. After all this is the most urgent and complex problem facing the country and it is imperative that our energies are directed towards a search for solutions that might bring this issue to a reasonable and acceptable conclusion.

However so much has been written by so many giving so many views in such a short time on the collapse of the two-day effort to restart the aborted peace talks that it is better to leave the subject to the pundits who will no doubt find more occasions and devote more column inches in the print media to provide us with learned discourses that some day might find their resting place in doctoral dissertations.

In a way the postponement of the Seychelles discussion on the climate change conference was propitious. Just last week the British Government’s chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern, one time chief economist of the World Bank, presented a much-awaited report on the economic costs of climate change and the catastrophic consequences that would result from ignoring the dangers ahead.

This made the case for commenting on that discussion sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation and Seychelles Government even more urgent and compelling.

The fact is that in many countries in the Commonwealth the issue of climate change is not taken too seriously. Even if there is some understanding of the problem it is mistakenly seen as far in the future and other considerations take priority over it.There is no doubt that sceptics who see climate change as a natural enough phenomenon and dismiss the perception that man is largely responsible for the destruction of our environment as unproven and so much of scientific gobbledygook.

It is true that not all scientists are agreed on whether there is any danger to our planet from these climatic changes and if so, question the notion that we are the chief culprits who will eventually destroy Mother Earth.

But the overwhelming scientific evidence points to the fact that catastrophic consequences would follow if we do not meet the challenges of global climate change and act now.

Naturally those of us who are not experts in the field must necessarily rely on those who are better informed to tell us what is happening and what we could do to mitigate the dangers ahead that would seriously affect future generations even if we escape them.

The conference brought together persons from many disciplines representing various Commonwealth institutions or from NGOs linked to them, international organizations and others who are involved in disaster management or climate change to discuss strategies that should be adopted in the future.

Ultimately recommendations made at Seychelles and a follow-up conference in Bangladesh next year will be put to the Commonwealth Heads of State and Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kampala next November.

Whatever decisions governments seriously concerned with issues such as climate change might make, they are hardly likely to be successful without public support and public participation. But public participation would be fruitful only if the people are informed and educated on these issues.

The situation is infinitely worse when politicians, power brokers and political hangers-on themselves are guilty of practices, or should one say malpractices, that contribute to a country’s environmental degradation.

This is the point at which the media plays a role. Representing the Commonwealth Press Union at the conference I presented a paper and then later spoke on the role of the media in both disaster management and climate change.

The wider plea made on behalf of the CPU was that the media cannot be a peripheral player just reporting the events as they occur. Governments and decision makers must co-opt the media and they must play a central role in whatever strategies are mapped out to deal with the twin issues.

When it comes to disaster the role of the media is clear enough and governments cannot do without them to convey information to the country and receive information from the disaster-affected areas.

But what often happens is that shortly after the worst is over governments and decision makers tend to distance the media unless they could become a convenient means of personal trumpet- blowing by politicians and interested NGOs.

In any case the media will pursue their own interests and report events and development whether the government gives them information or not.

Reporting the news is the primary task of the media. But we believe there is more that the media can do and that this should be recognised by governments in whatever strategies they plan to deal especially with climate change.

Public perception of the media (and I dare say in some of the media themselves) is that of a purveyor of news and entertainment. But this is to oversimplify its role. The media has a social responsibility and one aspect of that task is to educate the public which might not have the resources, the time, the opportunity and even the inclination to digest all the information that is available. This is particularly so in a technologically-advanced world where people are bombarded daily with a surfeit of information.

Especially on such complex issues such a climate change where the dangerous trends are not always visible or felt or are happening somewhere else in the world and are as such viewed as irrelevant to one’s own circumstance and livelihood, the media needs to take upon itself the responsibility of not only educating the people on major issues such as this but also holding governments and politicians accountable for their actions.

The melting ice caps in the Arctic or the disappearing perma frost in Siberia might not mean a thing to most people in Sri Lanka who have enough problems of immediate concern.

But the disappearing forest cover and other ecological damage in the country must surely concern them. It is well-known that the illicit felling of trees is going on almost daily in some parts of Sri Lanka. It is also well known that some politicians have a hand in it themselves or their political cronies and business associates do. Do we really have to spell out in the starkest terms the dangers before us – the lack of rainfall and the consequent drop in agricultural productivity if not total crop failure as a result of drought?
There are two things that need to be done before tragedy befalls the next generation, if not those living today.

The government, the scientific and academic community, civil society and the media must work closely together to educate the public on what precisely is climate change and how it could affect their lives and their progeny and how they could contribute, however small that might be, to the mitigation of its ill effects. The media is the means through which to do so.

At the same time the media must convey the concerns of the people, the problems they face at the lowest levels of the administration to the policy makers for without their woes been known and corrected the best strategies would remain simply airy fairy ivory-towerism imposed on them.

But how much interest is there in the Commonwealth media, not to mention our own, for environmental concerns unless it happens to generate a big news story?

Those who want to be part of the power loop prefer to write on politics. Environmental degradation and global climate change are not ‘sexy’ enough to invoke the interests of journalists and the media in general.

But climate change is too important to be left to politicians alone. We need to take a hand and that too quickly.