The activists, who have in the past campaigned for the cancellation of upcoming coal-based power plants in coastal areas, now want community radio stations to discuss climate and energy issues in local dialects of Bengali. In Bangladesh - which is considered one of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations - activist group YouthNet for Climate Justice has started posting Bengali commentary on social media about the reports of the IPCC, for example. While general community outreach by climate and energy NGOs and researchers in India and neighboring Bangladesh - where most people speak Bengali - is done in local languages, efforts are now being made to break down and translate technical terms. In recent months, think tanks have enlisted comics, poets and musicians to better communicate climate change threats to the public, with a broader aim of making the issue more accessible and widely understood as many people remain unaware.Īpart from spreading the knowledge more widely that extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts and cyclones are fueled by climate change, using local languages will also encourage people to demand political action, campaigners said. The problem is far from unique to South Asia - even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has tried to make its global findings easier to understand in recent years after criticism from scientists about jargon being a barrier. We want them to understand the issue and be an important stakeholder in the discussion." "We want to reach out to people who actually matter, who don't know what just transition is. "The dialogue around just transition is limited to echo chambers," said Mayank Aggarwal, who heads the just transition vertical for Indian consulting firm Climate Trends.Īggarwal has this year launched a podcast on just transition in Hindi and used social media platform X - formerly known as Twitter - to host debates about it in the language, which is widely spoken and understood in India's mining areas, he said. However, communication about the country's future move away from fossil fuels - and what this might entail - has yet to reach the people whose lives will be most affected, analysts and activists warned. Many are at risk of losing jobs and incomes as India builds its renewable energy capacity, just transition experts warn. India is the world's second-largest coal producer and at least 13 million people in the nation depend on the industry for a living, said a 2021 report by the National Foundation for India, a philanthropic organization focused on social justice. "What is the purpose of doing research if we cannot communicate the findings or the analysis to the communities or stakeholders?" Ahamed added. The UN's International Labor Organization (ILO) defines it as "greening the economy in a way that is as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned, creating decent work opportunities and leaving no one behind".Īhamed's research is among just a handful of efforts to make jargon-heavy climate change and energy transition dialogue - so far restricted to English-speaking think tanks and experts in India - accessible to people who will be impacted the most. The concept of just transition is complex, even in English, Thomson Reuters Foundation said. "Besides, I wanted to show there is hope, that there is a way out (of coal)," added Ahamed, who is based in Kolkata in eastern India and works with Pratichi India Trust, a research and advocacy group. It is not a direct translation but people do associate 'kalo' with coal so it gives an immediate context," said Ahamed, 45, who explained that there is no equivalent of just transition or even climate change in the Bengali language. Indian researcher Sabir Ahamed took a linguist's help to translate the term "just transition" into Bengali for his new study on the impact of coal mine closures on local people, as countries start to shift from fossil fuels to clean energy.Īhamed settled on the somewhat poetic "kalo theke aalo", which literally means "from darkness to hope", after consulting the language expert for a phrase his target audience of coal communities in India's state of West Bengal would understand.
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