How to tell a social science story about climate change

Earlier this year I met Dr Taryn Kong at an ICLEI-Africa congress on local water & climate issues. She gave a talk on a pilot project in the Olifants Catchment area where communities, scientists and decision-makers work together to identify challenges and solutions for dealing with flooding in the area.

National Government relies on experts to help plan for risks associated with climate change, including floods. The official structure for this is called the National Disaster-Management Advisory Forum. At the local level, advisory forums are often only administrative and decision-makers thus lack the right support and capacity to properly manage disaster risks.

It’s a scientific approach known as “systems thinking” — basically getting everyone out of their silo and into a network of knowledge-sharing and collaboration.

I wanted to know if it’s actually working, if people on the ground are on board with it, if it can be scaled up and applied anywhere to deal with any such climate change risks, and of course, the science of it all.

And I wanted to tell the story using a layered, multi-media format. This essentially means that our modern, busy online audience should be able to grasp key messages whether they:

• just see the title as they scroll past a post about the article on Facebook,
• click through and scroll down quickly just looking at the pictures, the sub-headings and the pull-out quotes,
• or read the whole article in all its glorious detail.

EXPLORE THE FULL FEATURE HERE

I believe we have to be realistic that most people don’t read full articles anymore, so we have to cater to them using the tools and skills we have available to present content in new and different ways. We have to make sure they are not bored and that they take something away from the article no matter how much or how little time they spend on it.

The first challenge for me, as a science writer with a hard science background, was realising that climate change is not all hard science, especially not when it comes to adaptation. Because people are involved: communities, politicians, experts.

The hard science can tell us that there will be more natural disasters, and that some areas will be worse affected. But when it comes to actually doing something about it, we need “soft” social science to shine hand in hand with empirical facts and data.

I’ve written about complicated predictive temperature models, and I’ve helped create a map that shows how changes in rainfall patterns will affect agricultural outputs, but this was my first attempt at explaining a social science approach to climate change adaptation.

Writing about highly technical science is tricky, partly because there is a risk of over-simplifying for a lay public audience. But writing about Kong’s “social learning” approach was even trickier because it’s quite abstract, and conceptual rather than tangible.

But I began with a recorded interview with Kong right after her talk, just so that she could put it all into context for me. For weeks we then had long email exchanges and phone calls so that she could get me onto the same page and iron out all the intricacies for me.

Because it wasn’t possible in terms of budget to visit the catchment area in person, I asked the NGO she works for if they have pictures that can help illustrate the situation in the area — how do people live and how do floods affect their livelihoods.

Kong also told me that an esteemed researcher from the University of Venda, Prof Agnes Musyoki, was a key player in terms of helping to “localise” the established science behind climate change adaptation to the communities.

Essentially, scientists have established “indicators” that can be used to assess the risk of flood damage, but indicators that are relevant in a city may not be relevant in a rural farming community. So the idea was that those in the know about local issues and conditions — local community members and authorities — should work with scientists to narrow down their own indicators and plans of action based on science.

So it is this “localisation” of the data and the science that we tried to visualise in the story.

“This is social learning in the sense that we don’t just give you the indicators and say, ‘here, use this’,” explains Kong. “You have to decide for yourself. It is collective learning that brings about transformation in practices or systems. It requires people and relationship-building .”

I am lucky enough to work with a graphics designer who loves to experiment with story-telling as much as I do. We sifted through the imagery and examples provided to us by Kong and colleagues, and came up with a way to visualise the outcomes of the pilot study in a way that feels almost interactive when a reader scrolls through the piece, yet the visualisations were created using basic graphics design tools and free Wordpress plugins.

“During my research to find the perfect plugin I stumbled upon Aesop Story Engine. This appeared to have everything we required in one package, except for mobile functionality of the parallax images, which was terribly unfortunate. But we implemented a workaround.” — Mark Hartman (ScienceLink/Artman Designs)

We simply implemented a responsive mobile version of the story with less bells and whistles since the plugin wasn’t optimised for mobile. In fact, since the story is free to republish with accreditation, we made assets available in a simple format to publishers who don’t use the Wordpress framework online, or who may need to publish in print format.

For the full desktop version, the scrolling images were created as follows:

Images and their sequences were set up and enhanced with relevant type and transitions in Adobe Photoshop. Exported from Photoshop to Wordpress, they fit the full width of the page and were set to a parallax gallery to slowly reveal more information (by scrolling down the article) or changes to the environments within the images. This gives a great effect of progression and clearly indicates, visually, what is happening as one progresses through the article (for example, an image of a street then becomes an image of a street flooded with water). — Mark Hartman (ScienceLink/Artman Designs)

Unfortunately, this method can be quite tedious as minor changes upon editing requires exports, uploads and ordering from scratch.

Regarding the sound clips —I tried to record interviews with as many of the people I spoke to for the article as possible. Prof Musyoki was extremely eloquent and passionate in her explanations, so I decided to include her voice extensively in the piece.

Visit https://oxpeckers.org/disrupting-the-future/ to listen.

I used Skype to call interviewees on landlines or cell phones, and recorded the calls using free software called Amolto Call Recorder — the sound quality is really great so I would highly recommend this tool. I then edited the clips using Audacity, also a free tool.

Wordpress has built-in functionality for sound clips, so again uploading them to the multi-media piece was simple.

Although producing a multi-media piece like this can be very time-consuming, and a lot of thought and planning must go into how to visualise abstract concepts, I hope we’ve demonstrated that it is possible to tell engaging stories about “soft” science using a variety free digital tools.

And if you can team up with creative, skilled people to help, like graphics designers or sound engineers for instance, the process will be much smoother.

Read the full feature at https://oxpeckers.org/disrupting-the-future/

I also hope the story itself shows a powerful example of where science meets society; where scientists are actively working with local communities and authorities to make tangible changes in the face of climate change.

Thanks to Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism’s ClimaTracker project & Code For Africa’s ImpactAfrica project for the opportunity to tell this story. Thanks also to UniVen’s Prof Agnes Musyoki, AWARD’s Dr Taryn Kong & Thabo David Mohlala, SANSA’s Phila Sibandze, and Maruleng disaster manager Zwakele Maseko.