Information Revolution And Climate Action: A Marriage With A Promise?

On September 23, 2014, as world leaders, corporations and other actors at the UN New York headquarters gave pledges on how they plan to address the challenge of climate change, climate-oriented blogs and social media platforms came alive.

This happened on the backdrop of the People’s March, the largest modern mobilization campaign on climate change, where the internet was buzzing with news, photos, videos and blogs of the marches which happened all over the world, with just a few days until the summit. The September summit, popularly referred to as the UN Climate Summit, aimed at building political momentum towards a global climate agreement to be adopted in Paris, 2015. A draft text of this agreement is scheduled to be ready in December 2014, at the UN Climate Talks in Peru.

These two incidences are an indication of how the communication tools available to us from the Information Revolution are shaping and transforming action towards addressing climate change, arguably one of the biggest challenges facing humanity at present. Even more interesting to note is that young people, who are no doubt tech-savvy, have been at the forefront in using modern communication tools, such as social media, to mobilize and catalyse the changes they desire.

For instance, the #lazyleader hashtag was a Twitter weapon fashioned against prominent world leaders – whose countries have a significant role in addressing climate change – nudging them to attend the UN Climate Summit, from where they would lay out their climate action plans. In this way, the UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCCC) used the tactic to eventually persuade David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, to attend the Summit. In Australia, a young person sent a faux press release about the dwindling value of stocks of a coal company in the country, leading to investor panic; subsequently, a huge portion of the stock value of the company was wiped off the market a few hours after the incident. Youth in Kenya, under the Kenya Power Shift movement, have been using social media, other communication as well as interactive capacity building exercises to build the skills of young people in Kenya to develop and scale innovative climate solutions in the country. Many more inspiring examples are happening elsewhere; simply look at the innovative proposals submitted to the MIT Climate CoLab intelligence crowd-sourcing contest.

Historically, the major debate between climate action proponents and sceptics has been anchored around whether or not there is scientific consensus that human beings are indeed responsible for the dangerous climate change happening. This narrative is now shifting rapidly, thanks to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, which indicate a 95% certainty that human beings are indeed causing dangerous climate change, thus effectively settling the debate.  Further, recent major reports by the IMF and New Climate Economy have made the case, and providing the attendant evidence, that economic growth and climate action can go hand in hand, in a win-win manner. The current narrative gaining traction now is on the increasingly viable possibilities of a future powered by clean and renewable energy, with the promising prospects of solar and wind energy taking centre-stage. Germany has been on the news a good number of times for breaking renewable energy records. The rapidly tumbling price of solar panels has also been receiving much attention from Netizens.

The good news is that these narratives are having a profound change. Just recently, the Rockefeller Foundation, a major investor in fossil fuels, noted the need to divest from fossil fuel investment portfolios, and has committed  to doing so. Evidently, the vows between the information revolution and climate change have undoubtedly been exchanged. The carbon free question now is: will this marriage lead to ‘happily ever after’? Well, signs are pointing in that direction.