Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Over the years, climate change has been viewed in different ways, through scientific, natural, social and political lenses. This study explores the different ways in which people engage with climate change, including the linkages between access to knowledge and skeptical representations of climate change. Primarily, the study focuses on climate change skepticism in Nigeria.

Climate change skepticism has largely been examined in developed countries. Through my research, I show that insights from Nigeria, a developing country, can be useful to provide a broader and improved understanding of how climate change skepticism can be approached globally.

Using social representations (SR), a theory used in environmental communication research, I explore how Nigerians construct climate change and its implications. This research shows how the acknowledgement of climate change does not imply a complete absence of skepticism; building on that, the forms, structures and types of climate change representations that react with skepticism are presented. Through a qualitative analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews carried out across four Nigerian states, I examine how climate change is represented in different ways and the elements of skepticism that emerged. Four different social representations of climate skepticism in Nigeria emerged: disengaged, economic, antagonizing, and denialist. In particular, I examine the integration of economic scenarios, assessment of development inequalities, and missing localization of climate indicators into those for social representations.

Thereby, my thesis contributes to an improved understanding of climate skepticism in a developing country such as Nigeria – an under-researched issue –, situating these representations in their respective contexts, and offering a framework to engage with other universal topics that have tendencies for polarization.