Complacent Marketing
Communication Fatigue In An Age Of Elastic Emergency
By Diana Obath
In February 2024, residents of Freetown in Sierra Leone woke to streets flooded by the heaviest rains in a decade. Homes, schools, and clinics were submerged while electricity and transport networks ground to a halt. Local media filled with images of families navigating waist-deep water, stories of displaced communities, and warnings from government officials about the intensifying climate risks. International outlets briefly noted the floods, drawing comparisons with southern Europe, where heatwaves had scorched Spain and Italy the previous summer. In Europe, coverage lingered in headlines for days, but in West Africa, attention shifted almost immediately to domestic political debates and rising energy prices.
Flooding also ravaged parts of East Africa in the last weeks of March 2025. Sadly, media, public, and even government attention mirrored the short-term disinterest seen in West Africa exactly one year earlier. The floodwaters persist, communities remain vulnerable, yet public focus is weakening.
This illustrates the reality that climate crises are persistent, but the attention they command is elastic. The risks do not vanish, but the sense of urgency expands and contracts depending on competing pressures, including political developments, economic instability, and global events beyond the continent.
Communicators in Africa continue to face a compounding challenge, where public awareness of climate risk does not automatically translate into engagement. In a continent where extreme weather affects millions, sustaining understanding over time is crucial. The difficulty has shifted from convincing people that the crisis exists to sustaining attention and awareness of the risks it poses despite the competing demands of everyday life. Climate change has moved beyond single, episodic disasters to an ongoing reality intertwined with
30 MAL71 / 26 ISSUE health, livelihoods, and national development. Communication now has to evolve to reflect this persistent elastic emergency.
The evolution of climate communication in Africa
Historically, much of climate communication in Africa has been reactive, tied to extreme events rather than continuous processes. Governments and international agencies relied on urgent messaging to mobilize attention, whether during droughts in the Sahel, cyclones in Mozambique, or locust invasions in East Africa. This strategy is effective for short-term action but can create fatigue when crises repeat or persist over time. Repeated exposure to messages emphasizing the scale of the problem without accompanying pathways for action can desensitize audiences and erode engagement. In Freetown, initial coverage of the floods generated widespread awareness and concern. Over subsequent weeks, fewer updates reached the public, and residents reported feeling helpless in the face of repeated infrastructure failures and ongoing flood risks. The same pattern is now visible in East Africa.
Data reinforces this challenge. A 2023 survey by Afrobarometer showed that 80 per cent of respondents across 18 African countries recognize climate change as a serious problem, yet fewer than 30 per cent feel confident that their communities can respond meaningfully. Awareness is high, but perceived agency is low. Communication in Africa faces the dual challenge of sustaining attention and building a sense of efficacy among audiences. People are aware that climate change is real and urgent, but they struggle to connect it with what they can do personally or collectively.
Funding patterns exacerbate the problem. International climate finance is frequently uneven, unpredictable, and concentrated in a handful of regions. In 2024, less than 20 per cent of global climate finance reached Africa, even though the continent is dispro portionately exposed to climate hazards. The uneven distribution is not simply a policy problem. It shapes how people judge the seriousness and fairness of global commitments and the credibility of the messages they hear. Communities interpret inconsistent funding as a signal that climate action is negotiable or contingent, making it harder for communicators to sustain public engagement. The role of PR and communication professionals has evolved accordingly. It is no longer sufficient to announce emergencies. The challenge is to sustain understanding, nurture ongoing engagement, and help audiences interpret both risk and response in an environment where attention ebbs and flows.
Strategies for sustaining focus in long-duration crises
To address the elasticity of attention, communicators must reframe their approach. One critical strategy is grounding climate narratives in local realities. Extreme weather affects health, livelihoods, and infrastructure in tangible ways. Heatwaves, floods, and droughts are not abstract concepts but events that disrupt daily life. Linking climate impacts to school access, market activity, transport reliability, and healthcare availability transforms the issue from a distant problem into an immediate concern. In Nairobi, campaigns connecting urban flooding to public transport disruptions and market closures resonated more effectively than warnings about sea level rise. When audiences can see how climate risks intersect with daily life, messaging retains relevance even when competing issues demand attention.
Urgency alone cannot sustain engagement; it must be paired with agency. Communities respond when they perceive meaningful ways to act. Local initiatives such as the restoration of wetlands in Lagos to mitigate flooding or renewable energy cooperatives