Cornell University Vice Provost & Professor Katherine McComas discusses the complexities in translating risk information to the public and highlights the One Health approach, recognizing the interconnections between human, animal, and environmental health.
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Climate Clear Episode 3
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Alison: I'm Alison Gregory and you're listening to Climate Clear, powered by AreaHub. This is the show where we help you discover climate and environmental issues in a clear, digestible way by talking to experts on these topics- all within 15 minutes.
Here with us today is Professor Katherine McComas, vice-provost for engagement and land grant affairs and professor of risk communication at Cornell University. Katherine was also president of the Society for Risk Analysis and has numerous publications about science communication and people's environmental attitudes and behaviors.
Katherine, thank you so much for joining us today. Would you mind starting us off by sharing a bit about your journey and your work in the environmental?
Katherine: I'm delighted to be here. Thank you, Alison, for inviting me.
So if I go way, way back, I can say that my mother was a naturalist and my father was a geologist. So there were aspects of the environment and being out in nature that were probably instilled early in my life, but it wasn't until later when I was pursuing a degree in journalism that my father, an environmental engineer at the time would come to me and share with me stories that he'd seen written in the newspaper. And he would say, well, this is what we said in these environmental public meetings, but this is what the journalists cover and they didn't get it right. You're going to be a journalist so you need to get it right.
And I thought about this and this question about what is it about scientific information that some times gets translated differently in a news media outlets or for a lay audience?
And it kind of started me on my quest to understand a little bit more about, I guess, the translation that can happen or the intercultural communication that happens between scientists and members of the late public. So I eventually pursued this in doctoral work at Cornell University, looking at risk communication and public engagement, particularly going back to those public meetings where people are gathered to hear information about local environmental risks or environmental health.
Sometimes these go well. Sometimes they don't. I wanted to study why and how, and that was the focus of my PhD research. And indeed these questions about: How do we engage people in decision-making about risks? Who do people trust for information? Where do they seek out information? What are the different ways that we provide information about risk?
These are questions that have been curiosities for me for my entire career. I don't know that I've answered my father's question. I think he probably wanted me to put the blame solely on journalists, but indeed what I've learned is that scientists take a lot of the responsibility too, in the way that they communicate their work or involve people in decision-making that can lead to greater or lesser understanding.
Alison: That's fascinating. And I think it's such an area where we can learn so much from you. I'm wondering how it is that we start to develop effective risk messages, especially with regard to increasing awareness, increasing trust and communicating effectively.
Katherine: Any good communication effort begins with trying to understand the goal of the communication effort in the audiences and trying to understand what are the audience's values, what are their beliefs, what are their attitudes and current behaviors, so that then we can use that information to better design our risk messages to design our processes for engaging.
So really an audience centered approach and interestingly enough, a lot of times the people that are trying to do the communication, if you ask them, what's the goal of your communication? What do you want people to do with this information? Sometimes they really can't articulate it or they say, well, we just think people need to know this information and you hear that a lot about science and risk information.
And I think that that's all well and good. But on any given day, people need to know a whole lot of different things. And we often want to know to what purpose do I need to know this information? Do I need to do something with it? Do I need to act? And that's very important. Also when we think about risk communication, which is often designed to make people more aware about a potential risk to their health and wellbeing or their family's health or wellness.
And we don't just want to tell people about the risk. We also want to tell people what they can do then once they know about that risk. And that's very important because some would say it's unethical to raise concern without providing people a means to address those concerns. So again, those are some of the things we think a lot about in our research.
Alison: Katherine. That is really interesting. And I can completely see how scientists often aren't mindful of their objective. In terms of how you've been developing effective approaches, one of the things that I've read is that you've been a big proponent of one health and I, and maybe many listening, would be interested to hear about one health, what it is and how it came about.
Katherine: So the one health concept addresses the interconnections between human, animal, and environmental health and wellbeing. It really takes a systems-level approach to understanding that all of these aspects are interconnected. So in other words, the health and wellbeing of one can affect the health and wellbeing of the other.
This has been something that has been given greater attention to when we think about the context of climate change and how climate change increases stressors on human health and well-being and animal health and wellbeing, as well as the environment. And so when we look at this as a systems perspective, we want to try to communicate about this and talk to people about the interconnections.
We need to understand how people might respond to such messages. So when we think about a one health approach, it necessitates our thinking about the shared health and wellbeing that we have with animals and wildlife. It also necessitates us thinking about the shared risks, for instance, zoonotic diseases or diseases that can be shared between animals and humans.
And they're often something that's talked about in the concept of one. The transmission aspect, and indeed COVID is considered a disease that was transmitted from wildlife to humans. When we talk about this, it's important to recognize that this can have unintended negative consequences. In the case of COVID, there was questions around bats as being responsible. We want to place blame on the wildlife or the animals for this.
And this can lead to us over focusing in on certain solutions without really viewing the wider system that led to this virus being in the animal or wildlife, and then being transmitted to humans.
We've done some research on this in terms of rabies and bats. Bats are in a very important species to our ecosystem.
They are hugely important to agriculture and they control pests. Bats are also being decimated by white nose syndrome, which is causing some of the worst die-offs of little brown bats in North America that's ever been seen before in other species of bats. Bats are facing risks of this white nose syndrome, which is a fungus that can wake bats up during hibernation in the winter. And then the bats fly out of the cave and they can't find insects to eat because it's winter time and they basically starve to death. So it's really a tragic thing. But people are also generally scared of bats and bats been vilified in media and television shows as scary creatures, vampire bats. And so a lot of people are scared about bats and then that's also can be a source of rabies transmission.
So one of the research questions we have is: Can you talk about bats and talk about rabies and talk about white nose syndrome and talk about the role of bats in our ecosystem that can lead to both people understanding and respecting bats within proper public health concerns, while also appreciating bats as part of the environment and as part of the ecosystem.
So we tried to design these what we call one health messages that tried to contextualize bats in this to see whether that would lead to greater support for bat conservation. And indeed, we found that we could generate responses where people were supportive of bat conservation, while also recognizing that indeed bats could be a source of public health risk.
So that's kind of this question is: Can you tell people about the risks and also the benefits in a way that helped them to see these issues in a broader context?
Alison: Thank you. That's a really great explanation. I appreciate how the one health approach that you've been embracing can help give people a broader or more holistic understanding with more nuance and more of an appreciation and an emphasis on the interconnectedness of living beings or things and of our environments.
Are there other examples where you're seeing that a one health approach to an issue is yielding positive results?
Katherine: I think that it comes back to: What are we trying to do with this one health approach? What's the goal of our communication effort? In the case of the bats and rabies, we were interested in a one health approach could lead to both positive outcomes for bats in terms of support for bat conservation, while also positive outcomes for public health messaging.
We've done some other work where we've looked at a one health approach and whether it could influence support for climate mitigation policies. So we did a study a few years back in regards to oceans and ocean warming and oysters.
Climate change is packing a dual punch for marine organisms, and oysters, in particular, are having a lot of challenges due to warming oceans and ocean acidification.
In terms of warming oceans, this can lead, for instance, to more presence of bacteria that can make people sick if you eat a raw or undercooked oyster. So there's a public health implication.
It can also, in terms of ocean acidification, it can lead to oysters larvae... they can't survive because the waters are so acidic.
So we were interested if people could care about oysters and whether or not that would lead to support for climate mitigation policies that might reduce, for instance, the carbon that is released into the atmosphere that then falls back and leads to greater acidification in the ocean. Or would they be more compelled by the warming of the ocean message that led to greater bacteria that could get people sick by eating raw or undercooked oysters?
So, in other words, could we just be concerned about it from the marine organism sense? Or did it have to have a public health perspective?
The long and the short of it is that emphasizing the effects on public health seems to be the primary driver in promoting public support for climate mitigation.
It's not to say that people don't care about baby oysters, but it's more perhaps visceral. They feel it in their gut, so to speak ,with the public health implications of getting sick from a raw or undercooked oyster. This was one study that we actually conducted in the Pacific Northwest, which is undergoing some of the highest levels of ocean acidification. It would be interesting to do this more broadly, but these are the types of questions that kind of drive our research in terms of, you know, how the different emphases of messages can lead to audience reactions and outcomes.
Alison: So Katherine, I appreciate your example because it shows which were the things that we're going to energize or activate people. You've been focusing on what actually engages or motivates them. I also appreciate the way you've been trying to look at things more broadly and in a very connected system.
As we wrap up now, is there anything in particular that you want to mention that you want people to be thinking about going forward or taking from this?
Katherine: One of the things that we learn in communication and we teach our students, is that not, everybody's going to pay attention to the information that you think it's so important that they know.
And so the question is trying to look at what makes that information meaningful or relevant to them. Research has shown that people will pay information to the extent that one, they view it as a problem; two, they see it as relevant to them or to something that they care; and three, that they believe that they can do something in regards to that information.
So, we have to always be mindful of trying to understand why do we think people should have this information? What can they do with this information? How can we make this information more meaningful or relevant to them?
So whether we're talking about an issue of climate change, And we want to make it very relevant to them in terms of what does it mean for their home, for their livelihood, for their children's livelihood or their work for their wellbeing to issues such as disease or health. Again, we need to bring it local. What does it mean for them? Because in any given day, people are asked to hold so many pieces of information in their mind, and we need to make sure that the information we think people ought to know is indeed landing on fertile ground in terms of it being meaningful to our audiences.
And so I just, again, advocate for an audience based approach toward communication.
Alison: Thank you so much, Katherine. That was very helpful and very clear.
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