Translation Failure in Climate Change

"Storm surge" was a new term for most mayors who were warned about the impending supertyphooon Yolanda. For many mayors, strong typhoons were a common experience so they interpreted the warnings as just another typhoon.

This is one tragic case of translation failure. Meteorologists communicated technical warnings in earnest, but local leaders and policymakers decoded it wrongly. The correct technical term "storm surge" communicated by the meteorologists were not understood by those who needed to act on those signals. 

The Zuellig Family Foundation has developed an interesting tool for converging what Catacutan (2009) refers to as Political Knowledge, Scientific Knowledge, and Local Knowledge. 

The photo below is a mayor's health governance dashboard used by Philippine mayors in targetting their governance interventions in the area of maternal health.

It has six columns, corresponding to the Six Building Blocks of health systems by the World Health Organization. These columns are anchored in the evidence-based, scientific knowledge promoted by WHO. The cells within the columns are color-coded red, yellow, and green, corresponding to the signals in a traffic light. Each cell corresponds to national and local initiatives institutions that contribute to maternal health. It includes elements such as social mobilization called Barangay Health Summits.

A mayor merely has to look for the red and yellow cells in this dashboard in order to prioritize. He recieves leadership coaching so that he can act on the technical and adaptive challenges indicated by the yellow or red cells. A coach then walks the mayor through the technical and adaptive issues, decision criteria, dependencies, and procedures in order to convert a cell from red to green. 

Climate change induces such translation gaps because new technical signals have to be disseminated and communicated to leaders. Leaders have to learn these technical signals in order to respond accordingly.

Translational medicine or translational science focuses on delivering knowledge from the research lab "bench-to-bedside", in the case of health research. This is also applicable to the work of resiliency and disaster risk reduction.

Sources:
 Catacutan (2009)