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Engaging climate communication: Audiences, frames, values and norms
... For example, researchers have explored how frames in the news can enable and constrain how people engage with important issues like climate change [15]. How problems are framed, the surrounding social context, and personal and institutional constraints are greater drivers for convincing people to act on climate change than access to information alone [16]. And there are several frames that communicators employ to highlight different facets of the crisis. ...
... And there are several frames that communicators employ to highlight different facets of the crisis. For example, climate science frames emphasize certainty and uncertainty; 'climate economics,' the costs and risks of action and inaction, and 'climate justice,' the relationships between ethics, morality and politics [16]. ...
Climate change affects the lives of millions of people. While much attention has been paid to the biophysical impacts of climate change, researchers have little empirical information on the impacts on human society. Climate related social challenges are difficult to accurately measure. One recent data source, the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) Project, could close that gap. It monitors the world’s broadcast, print, and web news in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, themes, and events driving our global society.
Increasingly, big data sources like GDELT are being used to understand how changing actors, events and sentiment in the news media can help understand social change. By analyzing GDELT’s data, applications, and methods, this review identifies the potential of this new data source for the increasingly important role that computational social science can play alongside established biophysical data in monitoring largescale environmental change.
... After all, all journalists rejected the idea of being an advocate or missionary for SF, trying to influence the behaviour of their readers. The fact that journalists presented themselves as neutral information transmitters and refused the role as an advocate or mobilizer has been found in previous research on climate journalism (Gibson et al. 2016;Gunster 2017), but also with regard to financial journalism (Strauß 2019). ...
Although sustainable finance (SF) has entered mainstream in the financial markets, the public remains fairly uninformed about the trend and its controversies. To understand the role of the news media vis-à-vis the public discourse of SF, 33 interviews with journalists in six European countries (AT, BE, CH, DE, NL, UK) were conducted. Results indicate that most journalists acknowledge the agenda-setting function of the media but perceive their influence in engaging the broader public as limited. If at all, journalists from financial news and specialized trade news outlets ascribe themselves a mediating function in influencing decision-making processes among the powerful elite. Despite journalists' overall vast criticism towards SF (“greenwashing”), the majority of journalists seemed to remain in an information transmitter and conveyer role. Challenges such as the complexity and dryness of the topic, missing conflicts, the announcement phase of commitments or lacking resources are mentioned as main obstacles that inhibit SF coverage to reach a mainstream audience beyond the financial sector.
This article combines two neglected elements within the history of online news: public service news sites and weather reporting, and it does so by utilising web archives, which – surprisingly – do not figure very prominently in journalism history. The two elements have – in isolation and in combination – at least in Denmark, become increasingly important as the online news sections of the two public service institutions Denmark’s Radio (DR) and TV2 consistently are among the most visited news sites and since reporting on the weather has gained in prominence and more recently, at least on DR TV, has become increasingly educational in its linking to issues of climate change. This article focusses on online news and conducts a historical analysis of the weather reporting on DR.dk from 2005 to 2022. The analysis seeks to balance the coding of journalistic texts with considerations of the online form of journalism, which here broadly means reading the webpage as a text. A key focus in the analysis is how meteorological data have been woven into cultural and social narratives, some of which are linked to climate change.
This research develops and tests a model of individual intentions to actively seek information about climate change. Our premise is that the individual's intention to actively seek information about climate change would determine their knowledge of and attitudes towards climate change, and this would in turn influence how they act or change their behaviors in response to that risk. Our model identifies key cognitive, affective, and situational variables drawn from research in human information behavior and risk communication. We conducted an online survey in which 212 participants in Canada and the United States responded. The results showed that the model was able to explain more than 40% of the variance in intention to seek climate change information. Social Norms, Affective Response, and Social Trust were the most important variables in influencing intention to seek climate change information. We conclude that climate change information seeking has a strong social dimension where social norms and expectations of relevant and respected others exert a major influence, and that the individual's emotional response towards the risk of climate change is more important than the individual's cog-nitive perception of how much information they need on climate change.
Background: Extreme weather events are intensifying with climate change, offering opportunities to raise the public urgency of this issue. The media’s role in communicating this connection is crucial.
Analysis: This article analyzes media coverage of wildfires over a nine-year period in British Columbia focusing on how they are linked to climate change, in particular, during the 2017 and 2018 record-breaking fire seasons.
Conclusion and implications: In media coverage in British Columbia, there is a marked absence of a link between climate change and wildfires and a tendency for connections to be tokenistic, decontextualized, and normalizing. More provocative narratives developed by various public figures that locate wildfires within broader narratives of climate crisis offer more compelling accounts.
A key challenge for climate communication is to materialize the climate crisis experientially and create an embedded climate politics which targets the causes of climate change at source. Since 2009, the climate movement has sought to keep coal, the principle contributor to global heating, in the ground, confronting the entrenched power of the coal-industrial complex at the places where it is extracted. This article analyzes data from extended ethnographic research at two such sites, on the Liverpool Plains in Australia and the Lausitz (Lusatia) in Eastern Germany. In both locations, farmers, villagers, citizens’ initiatives, Indigenous groups, and climate activists engaged in a process of “strategic communing” in a shared struggle to protect their homes, fields, and forests from coal mining. I focus on the shared narratives which emerged from this process and analyze them applying Smith and Howe’s concept of climate change as “social drama.” This analysis reveals how small-scale struggles against coal mining, and the scripts or storylines employed by different actors, can make the sites of struggle morally meaningful in the drama of climate change. Such struggles, I argue, are themselves an important theater in which the global risk of climate change is staged. They foster solidarity between different actors and allow the emergence of exemplary narratives, “shared storylines” of resistance to the fossil-fuel economy and agitation for climate action.
This manuscript examines the sourcing practices of climate change editorials published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today between 2014 and 2017. Utilizing a critical political economic approach, we found that despite the ideological differences between the newspapers, each relied on sourcing practices that emphasized the views of elite political and economic actors with often no scientific training. Furthermore, our examination indicates a shared interest in politicizing scientific debates through weaponized sourcing practices that undermine science in favor of partisanship.
How issues are framed in journalism in terms of problems, solutions, and levels of responsibility is of great importance in order to engage and lead toward individual and collective action. Data journalism has been acknowledged as a practice that often features a high level of interactivity, with the potential to engage the public. In this study, we investigate the content and production of climate change reporting in Swedish public service data journalism and discuss how frames are used in this alternative form of moderated science communication. Our results indicate an unconventional merger between science communication and data journalistic practices where motivational framing is used only to some extent as a way to increase public engagement with climate change. We also found that producers focus on educating and raising awareness rather than engaging the public and that they are guided by the ideal of objectivity.
This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey – Climate Change in the
American Mind – conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication
(http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication) and the George Mason University Center for
Climate Change Communication (http://www.climatechangecommunication.org). Interview dates:
November 23 – December 9, 2013. Interviews: 830 Adults (18+). Total average margin of error: +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. The research was funded by the Energy Foundation, the 11th Hour Project, the Grantham Foundation, and the V.K. Rasmussen Foundation.
This report extends and updates an ongoing program of research analyzing Americans' interpretations of and responses to climate change. This research segments the American public into six audiences that range along a spectrum of concern and issue engagement from the Alarmed, who are convinced of the reality and danger of climate change, and who are highly supportive of personal and political actions to mitigate the threat, to the Dismissive, who are equally convinced that climate change is not occurring and that no response should be made.
These results come from a nationally representative survey of 1,001 American adults, aged 18 and older. The
completion rate was 53 percent. The sample was weighted to correspond with US Census Bureau parameters
for the United States. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percent for the full sample, with 95 percent confidence. The survey was designed by Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University, and Edward Maibach and Connie Roser-‐Renouf of George Mason University, and was conducted December 24 through January 3 by Knowledge Networks, using an online research panel of American adults.
Global climate change – a threat of potentially unprecedented magnitude – is viewed from a variety of perspectives by Americans, with some dismissing the danger, some entirely unaware of its significance, and still others highly concerned and motivated to take action. Understanding the sources of these diverse perspectives is key to effective audience engagement: Messages that ignore the cultural and political underpinnings of people's views on climate change are less likely to succeed. In this chapter, we describe Global Warming's Six Americas – six unique audience segments that view and respond to the issue in distinct ways. We describe the beliefs and characteristics of each group and discuss methods of effectively communicating with them in light of: (1) the pro-or counter-attitudinal nature of messages on the issue for each group; (2) their willingness to exert the cognitive effort necessary to process information on the issue; (3) their propensity for counter-arguing, motivated reasoning and message distortion; and (4) the communication content they say they most desire and, hence, would be most likely to process and accept.
Seventeen articles written by Henry Shue between 1992 and 2014 on ethical issues about climate change.
This guest editorial is by Jerry A. Bell and Bassam Z. Shakhashiri. Bell is an emeritus professor in the department of chemistry at Simmons College, in Boston; he chaired the American Chemical Society’s Presidential Working Group on Climate Science. Shakhashiri was ACS president in 2012 and is the William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea in the department of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases are increasing. The well-known greenhouse effect caused by these gases traps solar energy, warming Earth’s atmosphere, land, and oceans and melting its ice. Thermal expansion of ocean water and liquid from melting land ice are raising sea levels, and dissolution of more carbon dioxide is lowering ocean pH. These observed changes are largely caused by human activities. The burning of fossil fuels drove the Industrial Revolution, which enormously raised the standard of ...
An analysis of why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action.
Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001.
In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming.
Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. Norgaard traces this denial through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. Her report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today's alarming predictions from climate scientists.