The focus of the Advocacy research program is on analyzing the economic, legal, and social aspects of other studies and promoting communication of the initiatives to society and authorities.
The Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Innovation (RCGI), funded by Shell of Brazil and the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), comprises five research programs. Four of them focus on developing or improving technologies to reduce Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions and on helping the country to resume its commitments made in the Paris Agreement. The fifth program – Advocacy – will be responsible for assessing the viability of these projects in economic, legal, and social terms and for developing strategies to present them to stakeholders.
According to program Coordinator Edmilson Moutinho dos Santos, a Professor at USP’s Institute of Energy and Environment, it is essential that the intelligence created by the other programs be communicated to society in general and to the authorities, who will be responsible for creating public policies based on this knowledge. To achieve its goals, Advocacy is divided into two lines of research, formed by interdisciplinary teams drawn from such areas as psychology, communications, law, economics, and public policy management.
The focus of the first line of research will be on standardization, regulation, and legislation. “Some of these technologies do not find legal support in the Brazilian system. We need to create a legal environment for them to be applied,” says Santos. According to him, technologies, whether products or processes, may reach the commercialization stage only when they are properly regulated and standardized. Advocacy researchers will have to move into the Federal sphere, at ABNT, for example, or even internationally, including the ISO (International Standardization Organization).
The second research area involves understanding the public perception of knowledge and technologies generated by the RCGI’s researchers. “It is necessary to understand the social and psychological reactions of people when challenged by a new technological solution,” says Santos. The program seeks to preemptively identify any negative perceptions that might arise and investigate communication strategies to define how information should be treated with each type of audience.
The professor sees the biggest challenge of Advocacy as being communication with the external public so that the topic is valued and the knowledge obtained in research is applied. “Despite occupying more and more newspaper space and stirring people’s imaginations, the greenhouse effect and climate change are long-term subjects that are still basically unfamiliar to the general public and even to various opinion makers.”