Climate change communication experts meet in Beijing

Climate change experts met in Beijing over the weekend to discuss trends and problems in communicating issues around global warming, with particular attention to raising public awareness of the issues.

Delegates to the 2013 International Conference on Climate Change Communication, which ran from Friday to Sunday, focused on the use of new media and social media in disseminating information, scientific data and weather warnings.

Experts from the National Development and Reform Commission attended the three-day conference, along with NGOs and academics from universities worldwide. Delegates presented their views and findings against the background of growing evidence of climate change.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released on Sept 27, showed global rises in temperature of 0.85 C over the past 130 years, and attributed the warming primarily to human activity.

According to the report, over the past 30 years, average temperatures of each decade have been warmer than any decade since 1850, again showing the clear trend of global warming.

"For this reason, we cannot allow any delay in communication messages on climate change," said Zheng Baowei, a professor at Renmin University of China and head of the China Center for Climate Change Communication.

The conference this year was jointly held by the China Center for Climate Change Communication, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication as well as the Research Center of Journalism and Social Development at Renmin University of China.