Media Research on Climate Change

Where have we been and where are we heading?

Ulrika Olausson, Peter Berglez, Ulrika Olausson, Peter Berglez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315415154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Research on media coverage of climate change, as a particular subfield of environmental communication research, has proliferated over the past decade. This book sets out to consider what conclusions can be drawn in light of the existing body of work, what lessons can be learnt, what are the challenges to be met, and what are the directions to be taken in order to further develop media research on climate change. The mixture of articles in this volume serve well to illustrate the range of empirical, theoretical, and methodological approaches subsumed under the broad heading of "media studies on climate change." Some contributions focus on the past—how the subfield has developed and what we can learn from that—and some look toward the future. Either way, all the authors share the ambition to suggest important avenues of research, be they centered on media, context, applicability of results, or theoretical advancement. As such they make a valuable contribution to identifying important directions for future research on the role of the media in communicating climate change. This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental Communication.

Media Representations of Climate Change: A Meta-Analysis of the Research Field

Mike S. Schäfer & Inga Schlichting

A flurry of studies in recent years has analyzed the role of media in climate change communication. This article provides a systematic, large-scale, and up-to-date overview of the objects and characteristics of this research field through a meta-analysis. It identifies 133 relevant studies and analyzes them empirically. The results show that research activity has risen strongly over time, and that the analytical spectrum has expanded to include an increasing number of countries, more types of media including online and social media, and different methodological approaches. The analysis also demonstrates, however, that scholarship in the field still concentrates strongly on Western countries and print media.

Aim and Relevance of a Meta-Analysis

Climate change is an “un-obtrusive” (e.g. Rogers & Dearing, 1988) issue that most people are unable to grasp first-hand. This is due to a number of reasons. First, climate change is usually described on large temporal and spatial scales; the World Meteorological Organization proposes to speak of “climate” only when referring to average weather indicators over at least 30 years (e.g. Claussen, 2003, p. 21), and spatially, “climate” is mostly described for entire continents, hemispheres, or the entire world (e.g. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2007, p. 11). For most people, such dimensions lie far beyond their lifeworld and biographical horizons.

Second, descriptions of the climate and its changes are primarily produced by science, in a way too complex to understand for many people: a growing number of disciplines participate in climate science, each with their own measures, models, and heuristics (Schützenmeister, 2008). Climate models include increasingly more variables and interrelations between these (e.g. Heffernan, 2010), and even though there seems to be a widely shared consensus within the scientific community about the basic features of anthropogenic climate change (cf. Hoffman, 2011; Oreskes, 2004), dissent and uncertainty can be found in many of the field’s more detailed questions (e.g. van der Sluis, 2012).

Third, apart from climate change itself being unobtrusive and complex, the same can be said about many of its (potential) effects and the measures to act upon them: many, and particularly the more severe, consequences of climate change lie in the future and are likely to hit some countries harder than others (cf. DARA Vulnerability Monitor, 2013). The gratifications for action taken are distant and delayed or even absent (Moser, 2010, p. 34). Climate politics is largely a supranational endeavor, taking place at international meetings such as the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. Furthermore, very different ways of action are advocated by various stakeholders based on rationales and justifications that are also often complex and difficult to understand (e.g. Gupta, 2010).

As a result, climate change and its manifold implications are not directly and easily perceivable. Most people learn about it from the media, which constitute the main source of information about the issue for “lay” people as well as for stakeholders and decision-makers (e.g. Arlt, Hoppe, & Wolling, 2011; Schäfer, 2012a, p. 69ff.; Stamm, Clark, & Eblacas, 2000) and have been described as “important arenas and important agents in the production, reproduction, and transformation of the meaning” of climate change (Carvalho, 2010, p. 172).

The scientific community has long acknowledged the importance of media communication on climate change. Since the early 1990s, many studies have appeared which analyze how media present climate change to various audiences. The number of these studies has risen to a point at which a systematic review of the research field is warranted. While a few introductory articles in the field already exist—such as Susanna Moser’s (2010), which includes a history of climate change communication and spans media as well as other kinds of communication, Alison Anderson’s (2009) more programmatic paper, formulating a research agenda for further analyses on mediated climate change communication, or Anabela Carvalho’s (2010) description of the political aspects of media coverage—an exhaustive and up-to-date overview of the research field, its objects and characteristics is still missing.

Following similar analyses in other fields, such as media coverage of science (Schäfer, 2012c), risk communication (Gurabardhi, Gutteling, & Kuttschreuter, 2004), and public health communication (Snyder & Hamilton, 2002), we will present such an overview by means of an empirical meta-analysis of studies on media portrayals of climate change. We will analyze the quantitative and qualitative development of the characteristics of the research field in four basic, yet relevant dimensions: we will analyze when the respective studies were published, where their geographical focus lay (i.e. which countries they focused on), what media they analyzed, and how these studies were conducted methodologically.

In doing so, we will analyze to what extent we find growth and diversification in the research field. Both are common by-products of the functional differentiation of research fields (e.g. Stichweh, 1994, p. 15ff), but, at the same time, both seem particularly relevant for studies of media portrayals of climate change: a growth of scholarly attention would correspond to the fact that in recent years climate change has become an important issue for the mass media in many countries (cf. Boykoff, 2011; Schäfer, Ivanov...