Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement By ...

motivator for developing national and international policy to mitigate anthropogenic climate change, Carvalho and Gupta argue that citizen engagement is a key factor in identifying what possibilities for mitigation and adaptation to climate change are acceptable for national governments to pursue. This engagement delineates the scope for both individual and political decision making, as well as for the successful implementation of any measures. Although challenging, public participation in policy processes has been shown to improve the quality of political decisions through the inclusion of alternative problem definitions and forms of knowledge. Recognizing that political efforts toward climate change policy are futile without strong public engagement, the UNFCCC has committed its parties to promote and facilitate “the development and implementation of … public participation in addressing climate change and its effects and developing adequate responses” (article 6). One of the instruments to assess the implementation of such a commitment is the national communications reports to the UNFCCC. Carvalho and Gupta present a comparative analysis of the national communications of six countries: China, India, Portugal, Tuvalu, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Those countries make very different contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions and have different degrees of vulnerability to climate change, making them significant case studies. The analysis of national communication reports examines what countries have done to promote public participation in climate change action and how the reports discursively construct citizens’ status and identities, as well as state–society relations.

The two following chapters share a focus on how various groups have used the Internet in response to the challenging spatial scale of climate change communication. First, Jönsson (chapter 6) and Feldpausch-Parker, Parker, and Peterson (chapter 7) account for forms of Web-mediated activism that involve some form of collective organization and action suggesting that communication structures may significantly enhance possibilities of engagement with the politics of climate change. Second, both chapters analyze forms of engagement with climate