James Painter

• University of Oxford

In April 2022 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its report on the mitigation of climate change, which included detailed discussion of the wide range of solutions at the personal, societal and governmental level needed to reduce emissions. The report generated extensive societal debate and interest in mainstream and soci...

UN climate conferences (COPs) have become powerful opportunities for driving public attention to climate issues and raising awareness via mainstream and social media coverage. While there is an abundance of studies examining various elements of the media arenas separately, there are currently no comparative analyses of how mainstream media outlets...

The way governments and policy makers think about climate futures has a wide-ranging impact on how they formulate policy and plan for climate change impacts. In the lead-up to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), the IPCC adopted a new scenarios framework that aimed to provide a fuller picture of the interacting elements and policy choices that affec...

Researchers have examined how extreme weather experiences influence climate change attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, with mixed results. However, limited research has explored how extreme weather experiences may affect climate-related perceptions and behaviors among climate activists. Given the significant role activism plays in climate action, as...

The heatwave affecting India from March to May 2022 was exceptional for its record temperatures, its early onset, its unusually long duration and the large area that was affected. It was responsible for at least 90 deaths, wheat crop failures, widespread power outages and 300 forest fires. According to the science organization World Weather Attribu...

Researchers are increasingly examining discourses associated with climate change and extreme weather events across different communication channels. However, further research is needed to examine how environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) frame extreme weather events and their relationship to climate change on social media platforms. T...

Dialogue-based approaches are crucially important for engaging the public about climate change. This entails going beyond a one-way information transfer to facilitating spaces in which diverse individuals can express their beliefs, emotions, opinions, and uncertainties about climate change in discussions with others. However, only a limited number...

Recent scholarship suggests that groups who oppose acting on climate change have shifted their emphasis from attacking the credibility of climate science itself to questioning the policies intended to address it, a position often called ‘response skepticism’. As television is the platform most used by audiences around the world to receive climate i...

Muslim consumers in the UK eat more meat than the national average. Individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds, particularly South Asian communities, experience poorer health outcomes, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease, associated with meat consumption. According to a YouGov survey, British Pakistani and Bangladeshi consumers use tele...

Previous scholarship suggests that elite media have tended to pay little attention to the adverse environmental impacts associated with meat consumption and production. Through content analysis of 116 articles from 2019, published on eight popular online news sites consumed by a wide range of demographics in the UK, including lower-income groups (t...

The ways in which news media communicate about heatwaves can influence how society conceptualises and addresses heatwave risks. We examined visual news coverage of the 2019 heatwaves in France, Germany, the Netherlands and UK, using content and visual critical discourse analyses. Many visuals were positively valenced (in contrast to article texts),...

One of the most significant and understudied changes in climate journalism in recent years, and the focus us this study, is the establishment of new niche sites. These sites, which are dedicated exclusively to covering climate-related issues, are now some of the most important sources of climate information. Drawing on interviews with site founders...

Mainstream media play a central role in shaping the ways diet and nutrition are discussed in the public sphere, yet few studies have explored its depictions of the meat-health nexus. Focusing on eight of the most popular news online sites consumed by lower-income groups in the UK-the demographic most likely to eat meat, according to a survey conduc...

Communication of heatwave risks is an important part of effective adaptation, with news media images playing an important role in the framing process. We examined visual news coverage of the 2019 heatwaves in France, Germany, the Netherlands and UK, using content and visual critical discourse analyses. Many visuals were positively valenced (in cont...

Survey results from news consumers around the world suggest that specialist or niche websites covering climate change are now one of the most important sources of climate information. However, there is very little detailed scholarship about these sites. We carried out semi-structured interviews with senior representatives of 14 online information s...

In 2019, several countries across Western Europe experienced record-breaking temperatures and heatwaves which, in some cases, reached temperatures of over 40 °C for three to four consecutive days during June and July. Extreme event attribution (EEA) studies show that anthropogenic climate change increased the likelihood of these events by at least...

In summer 2019, several countries in Europe experienced unprecedented heatwaves. Two extreme event attribution (EEA) studies, which assess the role of climate change in extreme weather events, were published at roughly the same time as the heatwaves were taking place (June/August 2019). Building on a prior study of online news media coverage of the...

In August 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), which generated extensive societal debate and interest in mainstream and social media. Using computational and conceptual text analysis, we examined more than 6,000 English-language posts on Twitter to establish the...

While studies have investigated UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meetings as drivers of climate change reporting as well as the geopolitical role of Pacific Islands in these international forums, little research examines the intersection: how media coverage of Pacific Islands and climate change (PICC) may be influenced by, or may...

The science of extreme event attribution (EEA) – which connects specific extreme weather events with anthropogenic climate change – could prove useful for engaging the public about climate change. However, there is limited empirical research examining EEA as a climate change communication tool. In order to help fill this gap, we conducted focus gro...

A growing body of research has explored whether evoking hope or fear about climate change is more effective at catalyzing attitude and behavior change among the public. Prior studies on this topic have primarily tested responses to text and/or still image manipulations, finding mixed results. Amid the rapidly growing creation and consumption of cli...

Contains the transcripts of the keynote lectures delivered at the 2nd Winter School for the Study of Communication

Impacts of climate change on Bolivia

‘Cultured’ meat has attracted a considerable amount of investor and media interest as an early-stage technology. Despite uncertainties about its future impact, news media may be contributing to promissory discourses, by stressing the potential benefits from cultured meat to the environment, health, animal welfare, and feeding a growing population....

Animal agriculture is a major producer of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to 14.5% of global emissions, which is approximately the same size as the transportation sector. Global meat consumption is projected to grow, which will increase animal agriculture’s negative impact on the environment. Public awareness of the link between animal food co...

Climate journalism gathers, evaluates, selects, and presents information about climate change, its characteristics, causes, and impacts, as well as ways to mitigate it, and distributes them via technical media to general and specialist audiences. It is an important source of information about climate change for many people. Currently, however, the...

Pacific Islands often exemplify climate change vulnerability, yet little scholarship has probed how these representations translate to the media. This study examines newspaper articles about Pacific Islands and climate change in American, British, and Australian newspapers from 1999 to 2018, analyzing volume, content, and dominant narratives. These...

Reporting the links (or lack of them) between human-induced climate change and individual extreme weather events poses a series of challenges for journalists. In recent years, their task has become more complicated by the increase in the number of extreme event attribution (EEA) studies which assess how climate change is affecting the intensity or...

Extreme event attribution (EEA) is a relatively new climate modeling methodology which explores possible links between extreme weather events (such as heat waves, droughts, and floods) and anthropogenic climate change. Such weather events are frequently depicted in the media, which enhances the potential of EEA coverage to serve as a tool to commun...

The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an independent scientific body focused on assessing the state of the world’s ecosystem services and biodiversity. IPBES members agreed in 2017 that a review of the Platform’s first work programme should be undertaken by an independent panel examining all...

The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an independent scientific body focused on assessing the state of the world’s ecosystem services and biodiversity. IPBES members agreed in 2017 that a review of the Platform’s first work programme should be undertaken by an independent panel examining all...

A focus on international comparisons of media coverage of climate change is important because of its inherently transnational character and because of the role the media play in shaping the context within which different publics are made aware of climate change. However, there are significant gaps in our understanding of the differences between cou...

Climate change is often seen as a remote, complex or ‘unobtrusive’ topic by the general public – a topic about which many people acquire information mainly from media reporting. However, media landscapes are changing rapidly, particularly with the growth of the internet and social media. A number of new media organisations are challenging tradition...

Poland is the largest hard coal producer in the European Union (EU), and remains very dependent on coal for its energy. Despite the significant long-term implications of EU mitigation policies for the Polish economy, coverage of climate change and policy in the Polish media remains very low. This study of the coverage both in print media and on tel...

The structure of the IPCC, which divides its analysis into three Working Groups (Physical Science Base; Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; and Mitigation) testifies to the role of thematic framing in discussing the evidence about climate change. This chapter looks at the way AR5 coverage applied and mobilized some key thematic frames that were...

Building on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) review of how to make its Assessment Reports (ARs) more accessible in the future, the research reported here assesses the extent to which the ARs are a useful tool through which scientific advice informs local decision-making on climate change in the United Kingdom. Results from int...

This article examines the television coverage of the three 2013 and 2014 reports by the Working Groups of the IPCC in five European countries: Germany, Norway, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. The presence, salience and dominance of four frames (disaster, uncertainty, explicit risk and opportunity) were examined in each of the bulletins monito...

New ‘digital-born players’ such as Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and Vice are challenging traditional media in their provision of news in general, and about the environment in particular. They have invested heavily in a wide range of countries and languages in an attempt to reach young audiences, who increasingly use social media as their source of new...

This article examines the television coverage of the three 2013 and 2014 reports by the Working Groups of the IPCC in five European countries: Germany, Norway, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. The presence, salience and dominance of four frames (disaster, uncertainty, explicit risk and opportunity) were examined in each of the bulletins monito...

Climate skepticism in the UK media has not been a major focus of recent research. This paper aims to help fill the gap by looking at the incidence of skeptical voices in UK newspapers across three periods: 2007, 2009/2010, and 2010/2011. After analyzing more than 3200 articles, it finds that skeptical voices increased their presence markedly across...

In the light of its potential benefits, some scientists have been using the concept of risk to frame their discussions of climate change. At the moment, the media hardly pick up on risk language, so can anything be done to encourage them?.

Mediation of climate change is bedevilled by the complexity of communicating scientific uncertainty. This paper revisits the results of a comparative study by James Painter using frame analysis to investigate newspaper coverage across six countries of scientific reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and articles about changes i...

Previous academic research on climate scepticism has tended to focus more on the way it has been organized, its tactics and its impact on policy outputs than on its prevalence in the media. Most of the literature has centred on the USA, where scepticism first appeared in an organized and politically effective form. This letter contrasts the way cli...

Sallie Hughes, Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), pp. x+286, $22.95, pb. - - Volume 39 Issue 2 - JAMES PAINTER

June Carolyn Erlick, Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced – The Irma Flaquer Story (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, Avalon Publishing Group, 2004), pp. xiii+355, $16.95, pb. - - Volume 37 Issue 2 - JAMES PAINTER

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The production, trade and use of coca in Bolivia have had enormous and wide-reaching political and socio-economic impacts, as have national and international efforts to suppress the country's drug trade. This book desribes Bolivia's coca boom and cocaine industry, the importance of drug money to the economy and the castrophic consequences of what P...

GaglianoJoseph, Coca Prohibition in Peru: The Historical Debates (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), pp. x + 245, $24.95. - Volume 28 Issue 1 - James Painter

StollDavid, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. xviii + 383, $55.00, $20.50, pb. - Volume 27 Issue 1 - James Painter

NicksonR. Andrew, Paraguay, World Bibliographical Series, Vol. 84 (Oxford, Santa Barbara and Denver: Clio Press, 1987), pp. xxvi + 230, £28.95. - Volume 21 Issue 1-2 - James Painter

In March 1986, when Vinicio Cerezo became Guatemala's first elected civilian president since 1966, there were high hopes that he could bring an end to the political violence which had disfigured the country's recent past. Over two years later, it is plain that he has been unable to wrest real power from the armed forces, and though the human rights...