Does social media promote environmental issues?

Jammu, Aug 1: The environmental sector has embraced social media rapidly and wholeheartedly. It is using the medium to support environmental campaigns and to connect people locally and cross-nationally on major environmental issues such as climate change. It also provides ordinary people with the ability to track the quality of the air and water around them and then share this data with others. In this post I discuss five essential ways social media has been used to support the environment:
1) With the “crowd”;
2) By enabling the rise of independent activists;
3) By creating campaign pressure points;
4) With the development of sensing hardware and personal wearables; and
5) With the use of geotags and hashtags.

Social media has become an important tool for providing a space and means for the public to participate in influencing or disallowing environmental decisions historically made by governments and corporations that affect us all. It has created a way for people to connect local environmental challenges and solutions to larger-scale narratives that will affect us as a global community. In this post, I discuss some of the ways that social media has reshaped our communication, new trends emerging and the potential for stakeholder engagement to shift because of social media’s incorporation as a tool to augment collective voices.

Social media and sensors that connect with online networks have the potential to change the way that the environmental sector and all stakeholders involved — public, corporate and government — interact, share information and make decisions. Social media furthers the reach of the public, allowing members to influence shifts in the environmental sector on every issue from moving away from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energy or changing the dynamic of current conversations on climate change. Another important trend is that social media has the potential to influence the circular economy, a concept that goes beyond biomimicry to identify ways that both our physical and material assets and our economic ones can match the earth’s cycles of use, reuse and rejuvenation.

In a way similar to the Divest/Invest movement, creating a circular economy would require the full participation of all stakeholders, from consumers to manufacturers. This is the type of participation campaigns that rely on social media are encouraging in order to assist the translation of movements from local economies to a larger scale.