Rural Indonesian Insight on Mass Media Role in Reducing Climate Change Risk

Abstract

This article investigates rural Indonesian insight on mass media’s role in building up public perceptions of risk associated with climate change. A massive flood crippled Wasior District, West Papua in 2010 and a deadly flood paralyzed Jakarta in early 2013. These are two major extreme weather events in Indonesia in the last 5 years associated with Climate Change. In such critical situations, mass media have played a critical role in delivering information. However, the rural community thinking is that they are less informed and that they could experience higher levels of climate related risk in the future. Thus, there are questions that need to be answered: (a) has the current type of information provided helped the rural population to be ready and aware of the risk? (b) what kind of new messages need to be crafted by mass media to lessen the information gap? This paper employs two types of analysis, media content analysis and secondary data analysis in order to gain results. Media content analysis was applied to two major national TV channels (TVRI and RCTI) at two year points 2010 and 2015 with the aim of understanding media’s efforts at communicating climate change risk. Following that process, a secondary data analysis was made of 2832 rural household survey. The findings of these studies will help improve the framing and communication of climate change risk. Drawing on the findings, it is apparent that media and communication can enable and encourage action in response to changes in climate at different levels of society. There is a need for mass media content that reaches a rural Indonesian audience, most likely through television. In addition, the programming should be supplemented with more locally appropriate content delivered to communities through local leaders and opinion-formers. Insights from this research can be utilized to increase the effectiveness of the work undertaken by these organizations, which are already helping rural Indonesia to respond to Climate Change.