Thursday, December 21, 2017

Climate Change Language

People are hungry for news about the risks of climate change but experts are alienating them with boring, technical jargon, the United Nations top environment official, Erik Solheim, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said. "When it comes to explaining why it's happening and what can be done to stop it, we're not speaking in language that everyone understands," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "The language of environmentalists has been boring, so uninspiring ... If we just speak a technical language, with many acronyms and politically-correct phrases, no one will listen," he said "You cannot bore people into action. They need to be excited and inspired to take action and change their behaviour."
More than 1.3 billion people live on agricultural land that is deteriorating and face worsening hunger, water shortages and poverty, the U.N. said. A third of the planet's land is severely degraded - which can happen through deforestation, overgrazing and drought - forcing people to migrate and increasing the risk of conflict over dwindling resources. Only 3 percent of climate finance is allocated to restoring land and forests.
"That's a big problem we need to address urgently," said Solheim

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