Everyone is an expert on awareness

In a government hall in Karachi, a heatwave awareness seminar is underway. Four speakers sit on stage, a hundred chairs are filled, a banner carries the sponsor's logo, and a photographer moves through the room. By the end there is applause, a flurry of social media posts, and a newspaper photo announcing that an awareness campaign has been held.

Nobody asks the only question that matters. Did anyone's awareness change? Did the daily wage labourers working outside at noon, the people genuinely at risk, get anything out of it? Usually nobody knows, because nobody asked.

I have spent nearly twenty-eight years working in environmental public awareness in Pakistan, and this scene has played out, in one form or another, for most of that time. Technology changed. Social media arrived. Everyone now carries a phone with a camera. But the underlying method has stayed almost exactly the same: pick a topic, print a poster, hold an event, take a photo, publish a post. If the tools changed but the method never did, are we actually learning, or just repeating ourselves?

Here is the deeper problem. In Pakistan's environmental sector, an unusual confidence is common. Journalists, activists, advocacy groups, teachers, officials and corporate social responsibility teams will all happily explain how public awareness should be done. Almost nobody says, this is not my area. That is not an accusation, it is an observation. Caring about the environment and knowing how to design environmental public awareness are two different skills. A person can be an excellent reporter, an effective campaigner or a gifted teacher, without ever having learned how a real awareness intervention is designed, delivered and measured.

Start with a distinction that keeps getting lost. Environmental awareness simply means a person knows something, say that plastic is harmful. Environmental public awareness is different: a communication process someone deliberately designs around one specific problem, for one specific audience, with one clear goal. Knowing plastic is harmful is just a fact about a person's mind. Asking why shopkeepers in one part of Karachi still use plastic bags, and what would make them switch, is a plan. Turning that plan into reality takes concrete steps: defining the true problem, gathering solid evidence instead of a few internet facts, identifying which audience must change and which audience can help or block that change, ordering the message, picking the right channel and measuring results before and after. Skip a step and what is left is not public awareness. It is only information handed out, mistaken for being something more.

This confusion shows up everywhere. A cleanup walk branded 'Say No To Plastic' generates good photographs but does nothing to change the daily shopping habit that created the waste. Air quality numbers get shared with no accompanying action a person can take, so they generate anxiety instead of change. Tree plantation drives announce impressive numbers of saplings planted in a day, and almost never report how many survived six months later. Waste segregation instructions are handed to households with no explanation of what happens after the truck arrives, and often the answer is that everything gets remixed anyway. In every case, the professional version is not more expensive. It simply asks a different first question: who needs to change, why haven't they already, and how will we know if they did.

Part of the reason this keeps happening is that the sector rewards the wrong things. Attendance counts, photographs, banners, media coverage and social media likes are treated as results. They are not. They are signs that an event occurred, nothing more. A genuine outcome assessment looks at what changed in people's knowledge, perceived risk, intention and practice, measured before an intervention and again afterward. This is not complicated work, usually just a short set of questions asked twice. The barrier has never been the difficulty of measurement. It has been the absence of any will to measure at all.

There is also a quieter problem worth naming honestly. Public relations and environmental public awareness are not the same thing, even though they get treated as interchangeable. Public relations build an institution's reputation. Public awareness changes public understanding and behaviour on a defined issue. Confusing the two is one of the most damaging habits in this field, because it lets an institution declare victory the moment it gets a good photograph, regardless of whether anyone's behavior actually moved.

There is also a stranger phenomenon worth admitting. People with only partial environmental knowledge, enough to speak confidently, not enough to tell science apart from advocacy, from public relations, from public awareness, often resist correction harder than complete newcomers do. A little knowledge convinces someone he already knows everything.

None of this requires an imported theory. It requires government agencies to fund permanent awareness units instead of one off events, universities to teach environmental communication as its own discipline, NGOs to separate awareness work from general event management, media houses to distinguish journalism from campaigning, professionals to accept that working around a topic does not make one an expert in it, and donors to demand measurable outcomes instead of headcounts and photographs.

We have spent decades running activities in the name of environmental awareness. We have rarely stopped to ask whether that awareness actually works, on whom, and why. That is the question this field now has to face, well beyond the photographs, the numbers and the banners.