“We are a Bit Blind About it”: A Qualitative Analysis of Climate Change-Related Perceptions and Communication Across South African Communities

ABSTRACT

Climate change-related perceptions and communication are important factors influencing people’s support for climate change policies and individual behavior. Since research on both climate change-related perceptions and communication is biased towards Western countries and standardized research methodologies, this paper investigates perceptions across South African communities using a deductive-inductive qualitative approach. 20 individuals in three communities of a South African town were interviewed about their climate change-related perceptions and communication. Results show that for individual concepts of climate change, interviewees’ perceptions differed across the communities: higher educated communities had more differentiated and diverse conceptions of causes and consequences of climate change and potential countermeasures. Most interviewees, across the communities, stressed that they considered climate change as an important problem, although other social problems seemed more pressing. Interestingly, all three communities most frequently encounter the issue of climate change through new and traditional mass media, but their self-assessed knowledge about it varies widely.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• perceptions of climate change
• media use and information sources
• South Africa
• qualitative interviews
• Global South

Acknowledgements

This research is based on research supported by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the authors and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard. The authors thank Mr L Magenuka for his assistance with the interviews and Mr PM Sibula for translating and transcribing interviews from isiXhosa to English. Thank you also to Ms D Duvenage for transcribing all other interviews. Additional thanks go to Prof H Kotzé for his insightful advice and comments and Prof P Weingart for his conceptual help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data will be made available upon request from the corresponding author.

Notes

1 Global South, broadly defined, refers to countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Hence, it refers to regions “outside Europe and North America, mostly […] low-income and often politically or culturally marginalized” (Dados & Connell, 2012, p. 12).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation [grant number 93097].