NEWS media play an important role to disseminate climate change’s wide range of topics. But particularly in Indonesia, the readers are still segmented. All while expanding the message of climate change beyond the circle of academicians is highly necessary.
Communicating such issues to different audiences has its own set of challenges. Especially when it comes to the general audience, who above all else, needs to be educated on the issue.
Reuters Digital News Report 2022 explores audience attitudes and behaviors relating to climate change issues. The report’s chapter “How People Access and Think about Climate Change News,” mentioned that there is part of the proportion interested in climate change news – for all markets.
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Out of 11 Asia-Pacific countries, Indonesia has been ranked 8th with the same percentage of 39 as Taiwan and Singapore. In other words, climate change is still an undermined issue among common Indonesian.
In the middle of 2022, I talked to some farmers in Blitar Regency, East Java during my field research. I did not ask them directly about the issue, since I know that they may have little to no idea of what climate change is. The farmer was rather familiar with the word ‘drought’.
It is common to think that such a village surrounded by mountain ranges is blessed with an abundance of water, fertile soil, and humid weather. But everything has changed past several years. Now, rice fields are in constant need to be pumped with water many times.
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The farmers told me that a ‘severe drought’ has gripped their rice fields due to the lack of water irrigation and a shortage of water in the last ten years. Towards this phenomenon, again, the farmers prefer to use ‘drought’ rather than ‘climate change’.
These sorts of difficulties are what forced them to alter the rice fields to less-thirsty commodities like corn. As one of the best dryland crops, corn has a lower water demand and more durability during the dry season. It has become a popular pattern among farmers to shift between corn and rice and vice versa according to water availability.
Besides drought, those villagers living by the mountain are the first to bear the impact of flash-flood. Java island in recent years had seen a soaring frequency of flash-flooding caused by deforestation or damaged peatlands.
Again, the villagers saw this phenomenon as merely a ‘flash flood’. Rather than a part of a bigger phenomenon called climate change, global warming, or any scientific incident.
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This is a sign that we, as scholars, need not to brags around spewing sophisticated climate terminologies since there was a communication gap between us and the common people. In their mind, there are only specific disasters, such as drought or flash floods.