Climate change is often reported in the context of wildfires and floods. Unfortunately, the persistent focus on disasters can lead to eco-anxiety. As a counterbalance reports of community climate action can give hope and inspire others to do more

Tyrrell, Belinda

WEISSMANN, ELKE

English

Edge Hill University Research Information Repository

A Future for the Climate: Devolution and Participation in Climate DocumentariesElke Weissmann, Edge Hill University, and Belinda Tyrrell, University of LiverpoolStandfirstClimate change is often reported in the context of wildfires and floods. Unfortunately, the persistent focus on disasters can lead to eco-anxiety. As a counterbalance reports of community climate action can give hope and inspire others to do more.Climate Change as DisasterHorrendous wildfires in Greece, apocalyptic downpours in Libya – unless you have managed to hide under a rock, you must be aware of the ever-increasing frequency of catastrophic climate events. Climate disasters are so frequent now that it can feel as if one is immediately following the next, so that the disasters push each other out of the headlines. Climate change becomes harder to deny in the light of these catastrophes; but psychologists (Whitmarsh et al. 2022; Vakoch and Mickey 2022) have found that the constant stream of news about climate disasters is also not conducive to us changing our behaviour because it can cause eco-anxiety which can lead to paralysis (Heeren et al. 2022; Innocenti et al. 2023): we are frozen in fear as we see the world burn and/or drown around us.Joseph Rehling (2022) compares the dread of climate anxiety with our existential fear of dying. He argues that this may explain why so many of us continue as if nothing had happened. But we want to contest this: is it true that so many of us do nothing? If we believe media reporting, then perhaps yes: apart from Gardeners’ World (BBC, 1968-present) and Countryfile (BBC, 1988-present) which occasionally present us with individual or community projects that are focused on sustainability and wildlife conservation, very few stories of everyday climate action circulate in the media. But many of us are already doing their bit: be that by shopping environmentally consciously, for example by buying as much local produce as possible, by diligently recycling, by walking or cycling or taking public transport, by shifting to green energy providers, installing solar panels or heat pumps and so on. And some of us do significantly more. Reporting Climate Action through CollaborationWhat could be the impact if more of these actions were reported? What would happen if the media responded to a populace who already consider that the environment is the fourth most important topic that politicians need to address (YouGov, 2023)? These are questions that emerged as we conducted research on a number of local community groups in Liverpool, UK, and we here want to share some of our findings. Let’s be honest first, though: we approached our project ourselves by asking how we can get ordinary people to change their behaviour. But then we realised that rather than approaching communities like a teacher, didactically, as so much reporting does, we should see ourselves as collaborators with skills that can compliment those of the community. Our skills were those of media production: we worked with our students to make short documentaries about four climate assemblies and four local community groups. These were not skills our community groups were interested in developing. They had enough on their plates with their projects and were glad that we could make a programme about them which they could use to publicise their work. This points to the need to rethink some of the rhetoric about participation and media: while we can, theoretically, now all produce our own media content and have, as a result, become prosumers (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010), we don’t all want to. There are other things that may seem more important in our quest to keep the planet habitable. It's not just the Climate, StupidOne example of these other things is the education and support for inexperienced cyclists that Aigburth Community Cycle Club, one of our community groups, offers. Other groups included an in Bloom group that gardened with an environmental consciousness, a litter picking group, and the Love Wavertree food club which uses food waste from the supermarkets to feed the local community. Aigburth Community Cycle Club was founded in 2021 and leads community rides to help develop confidence in new cyclists. We followed one of their rides and interviewed both the ride leaders and the group members who came along. A quick search of some news and television databases shows that there are relatively few stories about cycling in the British press or on television. In the press, cycling is usually mentioned in relation to road safety, often in the context of the death or serious injury of a cyclist in an accident. This makes cycling appear dangerous. Other cycling stories focus on professional cycling, thus creating a frame of sports and leisure rather than suggesting that cycling is a means of transport. The sports frame is the most prevalent on television where reporting about cycling is largely confined to cycle races or recreational events. In our interviews, cycling for leisure was also a key feature but it wasn’t the only one. Our participants highlighted a number of benefits which included exercise and physical and mental health. In addition, they also suggested that cycling was cheaper than running a car, that it was faster than walking and that it was environmentally more friendly than driving. The ride members also described driving as stressful, which they didn’t think cycling was. Thus, the short programme made visible that cycling is a form of transport, that it comes with a number of co-benefits, including the reduction of costs, improvement of physical and mental health, etc. to those able to cycle. The participants’ clear articulation of the benefits of cycling highlights that providing the space for the community to express why they are involved in climate action can lead to a much greater visibility of the positive impacts of their actions that extend to other areas of daily life. In addition, the community brought these benefits into alignment, thus suggesting that environmental health and economic benefits go hand in hand. This is in stark contrast to discourses currently circulating in the British media in which the delay of climate-positive actions by the government are presented as providing economic relief for low-income families (Martin, Oliver and Brignal 2023). In other words, a community-led approach to reporting (Malik et al. 2019) on environmentally positive actions develops a much more complex, and most of all much more positive representation of what climate action can involve. Local Climate Action and HopeWe followed up the screening of these programmes with a qualitative questionnaire to get a sense of what impact programmes such as the one about Aigburth Community Cycle Club might have on the community. It was noticeable that the screenings were met with wide-spread positivity. Many respondents emphasised the positive energy they felt could be vicariously experienced through watching the programmes. Thus, in a moment when we may fear the effects of climate change, programmes about community projects fill audiences with hope. More important, however, was that they inspired those currently not involved in any of these groups. As one respondent wrote: ‘[the programmes were] great for communicating what is going on in [the] local area and how we can get involved.’ Thus, the current lack of reporting of such community efforts makes it harder for those who don’t know what to do to become involved. Importantly, reporting needs to be specific to the localities of the residents: otherwise, climate action, like climate change, appears as something that is done ‘over there’, i.e. is spatially distance from viewers (Braasch 2013). But climate action happens everywhere, and it is precisely by showcasing ‘the little things you do [that] can have a massive impact’ as another respondent put it, that removes the sense of overwhelm that eco-anxiety and existential dread can engender. In other words, the reporting of climate change as disasters needs to be balanced with stories of local communities already doing their bit. As our community-led approach shows, local communities are already doing a lot, and they are very good at articulating the variety of benefits to their actions, including those not directly linked to the environment. It is by representing both the co-benefits of climate action and ‘the little things’ that people can do, that others, who are currently not doing a lot, can be inspired. AcknowledgementsThis chapter is an outcome of the British Academy funded project ‘Community-led Television, Local Voice and Climate Action’, funded through their Shared Understandings of Sustainable Futures stream. Reference: Application SSF\210053ReferencesGary Braasch (2013) ‘Climate change: is seeing believing?’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 69, No. 6 pp. 33–41.Countryfile (1988-present) BBC. BBC Studios.Gardeners’ World (1968-present) BBC. BBC Studios.Alexandre Heeren, Camille Mouguiama-Daouda and Alba Contreras (2022). ‘On Climate Anxiety and the Threat It May Pose to Daily Life Functioning and Adaptation: A Study among European and African French-Speaking Participants’, Climatic Change: An Interdisciplinary, International Journal Devoted to the Description, Causes and Implications of Climatic Change, Vol. 173, No. 15, available at: https://link-springer-com.edgehill.idm.oclc.org/article/10.1007/s10584-022-03402-2 (accessed 21 September 2023). Matteo Innocenti, Gabriele Santarelli, Gaia Surya Lombardi, Lorenzo Ciabini, Doris Zjalic,  Mattia Di Russo and Chiara Cadeddu (2023). ‘How Can Climate Change Anxiety Induce Both Pro-Environmental Behaviours and Eco-Paralysis? The Mediating Role of General Self-Efficacy,’ International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Vol. 20, No. 3085, available at: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2779569501?accountid=10671 (accessed 23 September 2023). Sarita Malik, Caroline Chapain and Roberta Comunian (eds.) (2019). Community Filmmaking: Diversity, Practices and Places. Routledge Studies in Media and Cultural Industries, 1. London: Routledge.Daniel Martin, Matt Oliver and Mattie Brignal (2023) ‘How Rishi Sunak watering down his net zero pledges will help consumers’. The Telegraph, 20 September, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/09/20/net-zero-green-pledges-rishi-sunak-plans-water-down/?utmsource=email (accessed 22 September 2023). Joseph T.C. Rehling (2022). ‘Conceptualising Eco-Anxiety Using an Existential Framework,’ South African Journal of Psychology, Vol. 52, No. 4 pp. 472–485. George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson (2010) ‘Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital “prosumer”,’ Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1 pp. 13–36.Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey (eds) (2022) Eco-anxiety and Planetary Hope: Experiencing the Twin Disasters of Covid-19 and Climate Change. Cham: Springer. Lorraine Whitmarsh, Lois Player, Angelica Jiongco, Melissa James, Marc Williams, Elizabeth Marks and Patrick Kennedy-Williams (2022) ‘Climate Anxiety: What Predicts It and How Is It Related to Climate Action?’ Journal of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 83, available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101866 (accessed 21 September 2023). YouGov (2023). ‘The Most Important Issues Facing the Country’, YouGov, <https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/the-most-important-issues-facing-the-country>, accessed 18 September 2023.About the AuthorsElke Weissmann is a Reader in Film and Television at Edge Hill University. She has published widely on television, particular on Transnational Television Drama (2012). She is also editor of Critical Studies in Television and head of Edge Hill University’s Television Studies Research Group. Belinda Tyrrell is a research associate at the University of Liverpool’s Heseltine Institute. A former policy and programmes officer at Liverpool City Council, Belinda worked on the performance monitoring of externally funded programmes including Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, Housing Market Renewal Initiative and was part of the Project Liverpool Team which mapped and tracked the value of Area Based Initiatives within the City of Liverpool.

A Future for the Climate:Devolution and Participation in Climate Documentaries

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A Future for the Climate:Devolution and Participation in Climate Documentaries

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