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Media’s Role in Global Ecopolitics: Unravelling Climate Change Narratives and Fostering Informed Dialogue
Abstract
The chapter investigates the crucial part played by the media in influencing the global eco-political discourse on climate change. It explores how media shapes public perception, policy development, and collective action in response to climate change concerns, drawing on a thorough analysis of media narratives. It sheds light on the power dynamics, biases, and implications that affect well-informed decision-making by dissecting the intricate network of climate change narratives that are widely spread by the media. The chapter examines how media plays a key role in forming not only understanding but also emotional connections to environmental challenges, from traditional news reporting to cutting-edge digital platforms. The chapter highlights the capacity of media to promote informed discourse and inspire group action. By presenting effective initiatives, innovations, and community-driven activities, the chapter sees the advent of climate change solutions journalism as a potent weapon for driving positive change. Furthermore, in order to give climate change narratives a comprehensive understanding, our findings emphasise the significance of involving a variety of stakeholders, including scientists, politicians, activists, and affected communities.
To close gaps in information distribution and policy creation, the chapter supports continuing cooperation between the media, scientific communities, and policymakers. In addition, the chapter suggests incorporating interdisciplinary viewpoints to develop thorough narratives that accurately depict the complexity of climate change challenges. Additionally, it emphasises the necessity for media outlets to place a high priority on accountability, moral reporting, and open fact-checking procedures in order to maintain the veracity of climate change narratives. In conclusion, by providing a comprehensive understanding of climate change narratives, their implications, and their ability to create informed dialogue, the chapter contributes to the discussion on the media’s crucial role in global ecopolitics.
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Eco-social work is a new field of social work practice and research. The discussions about nature, ecology, environment, sustainable development, and indigenous eco-social knowledge gradually became a new direction for social work localization. Eco-social work emphasizes the intersubjectivity and the harmonious coexistence with nature, and the sustainability of welfare integration at the value level. It is the need of citizens to enhance environmental protection awareness and farmers and nomads to protect their ecological rights and interests. Eco-social work can integrate theoretical perspectives, such as ecosystem theory, strengths perspective, intersectionality perspective, and green development, to promote the innovation and application of the social work practice approaches of harmonious coexistence with nature. With professional, social, and cultural-ecological knowledge, eco-social work can build a bridge between the national ecological development plan and the ecological needs of traditional livelihoods. Besides, more knowledge of eco-social work will promote the effectiveness of environmental governance and the achievement of ecological welfare.
The global scale of the ocean plastics crisis demands a collective change in plastic consumption behaviors. The documentary series Blue Planet II has been praised for driving changes in consumer behaviors by raising awareness about this issue, yet there is little evidence that directly links the documentary to viewers' plastic consumption. We investigated the effectiveness of Blue Planet II as a behavior change intervention by conducting randomized control trials and used revealed preferences to measure plastic consumption behaviors. Although environmental knowledge was found to be positively influenced by Blue Planet II, this did not translate into a behavioral change among participants. Our results support the hypothesis that, due to the complexities of human behavior, exposure to a single documentary is unlikely to lead to a distinct increase in individual pro‐environmental actions. However, the potential for Blue Planet II to have an impact at a wider societal level, namely through influencing policy, remains unexplored.
Climate change has been one of the most debated topics in the past few decades, but a number of challenges have hindered the development of robust policies and strategies by nations. At the same time, social media platforms—such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook—have given the opportunity for the general public to share opinions and engage with the issue of climate change like never before. This phenomenon is considered to be a new form of soft power which can provide input into the discussion and possibly affect the current international political mechanisms. The present paper aims to (1) define the forms and characteristics of social media as a soft power method, (2) analyze its influence on the awareness of societies, and (3) assess if increased public awareness could influence the official political and policy processes. In order to assess if social media has influence on people’s relative awareness, we have focused on analyzing the links between a few highly visible climate change related events and the trends in people’s searches on the Internet in connection to those events. The study finds that even though it is difficult to assess the effects of social media as a soft power tool with certainty, there are visible links between social media and changing public perceptions, with the possibility of public opinion influencing political decision-making.
Sustainable development (SD) has become a popular catchphrase in contemporary development discourse. However, in spite of its pervasiveness and the massive popularity it has garnered over the years, the concept still seems unclear as many people continue to ask questions about its meaning and history, as well as what it entails and implies for development theory and practice. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discourse on SD by further explaining the paradigm and its implications for human thinking and actions in the quest for sustainable development. This is done through extensive literature review, combining aspects of the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and the Recursive Content Abstraction (RCA) analytical approach. The paper finds and argues that the entire issue of sustainable development centres around inter- and intragenerational equity anchored essentially on three-dimensional distinct but interconnected pillars, namely the environment, economy, and society. Decision-makers need to be constantly mindful of the relationships, complementarities, and trade-offs among these pillars and ensure responsible human behaviour and actions at the international, national, community and individual levels in order to uphold and promote the tenets of this paradigm in the interest of human development. More needs to be done by the key players—particularly the United Nations (UN), governments, private sector, and civil society organisations—in terms of policies, education and regulation on social, economic and environmental resource management to ensure that everyone is sustainable development aware, conscious, cultured and compliant.
The news media play a influential role in shaping public attitudes on a wide range of issues—climate change included. As climate change has risen in salience, the average American is much more likely to be exposed to news coverage now than in the past. Yet, we don't have a clear understanding of how the content of this news coverage has changed over time, despite likely playing an important part in fostering or inhibiting public support and engagement in climate action. In this paper we use a combination of automated and manual content analysis of the most influential media sources in the U.S. -the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press- to illustrate the prevalence of different frames in the news coverage of climate change and their dynamics over time from the start of the climate change debate in 1988. Specifically, we focus on three types of frames, based on previous research: economic costs and benefits associated with climate mitigation, appeals to conservative and free market values and principles, and uncertainties and risk surrounding climate change. We find that many of the frames found to reduce people's propensity to support and engage in climate action have been on the decline in the mainstream media, such as frames emphasizing potential economic harms of climate mitigation policy or uncertainty. At the same time, frames conducive to such engagement by the general public have been on the rise, such as those highlighting economic benefits of climate action. News content is also more likely now than in the past to use language emphasizing risk and danger, and to use the present tense. To the extent that media framing plays an important role in fostering climate action in the public, these are welcome developments.
This paper focuses on the role of Media in enhancement of environmental awareness. The environment is something we are very familiar with. It's everything that makes up our surroundings and affects our ability to live on the earth-the air we breathe the water that covers most of the earth's surface. The Environment that consists of everything surrounding us is becoming a major problem day by day. Thus there has been the traditional means of creating environmental awareness among common people. Mass Media plays an important role for creating environment awareness among people. Environment is the basic need of life like food and water. But our actions have aggravated it severely. Realizing our mistake we have taken commendable steps to reform it and a proper media attention might give a higher success rate to any mission related to environment. Most recent steps by the Government of India for promoting sanitation 'Swachchha Bharat Abhiyan' has got success by the united efforts of the Government and media.
Media bridge different ways of knowing about the environment, and often mediate public perceptions, attitudes, perspectives, and behaviors related to environmental issues. From entertainment to news media, spanning television, films, books, flyers, newspapers, magazines, radio, and the Internet, media portrayals provide critical links between, on the one hand, formal environmental change science and policy decision-making and, on the other, the realities of how people experience and interact with their environments on the ground. Media representations thereby influence the spectrum of perceived possibilities for different forms of environmental engagement across time and place and are in turn shaped by framings, journalistic norms, and the cultural politics of the media economy, including both macro- and microscale factors.
The glass ceiling and the glass cliff are metaphors that point to discriminatory obstacles that handicap qualified women or other minorities in their professional upward mobility regardless of their actual performances. This entry defines these concepts, gives research illustrations of the phenomena and their causes, and points to real-life examples.
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/book/sage-encyclopedia-political-behavior#description
Experts and the general public often perceive environmental problems differently. Moreover, regulatory responses to environmental issues often do not coincide with consensus expert recommendations. These two facts are mutually consistent – it is unlikely that regulations based on factual claims that are substantially different from voters’ opinions would be politically feasible. Given that the public’s beliefs constrain policy choices, it is vital to understand how beliefs are formed, whether they will be biased, and how the inevitable heterogeneity in people’s beliefs filters through the political system to affect policy. We review recent theoretical and empirical work on individual inference, social learning, and the supply of information by the media, and identify the potential for biased beliefs to arise. We then examine the interaction between beliefs and politics: can national elections and legislative votes be expected to result in unbiased collective decisions, do heterogeneous beliefs induce strategic political actors to alter their policy choices, and how do experts and lobby groups affect the information available to policy-makers? We conclude by suggesting that the relationship between beliefs and policy choices is a relatively neglected aspect of the theory of environmental regulation, and a fruitful area for further research.
This paper offers an analytical model for policy analysis. It aims at providing a comprehensive framework of instruments to assess whether and how a policy is leading towards sustainability in a broad, deep and transformational sense. It uses the theoretical principles of green political economy to develop analytical axes, namely social-ecological resilience, capabilities for human flourishing and strong sustainability. Furthermore, critical processes are articulated in order to search for additional sources of evidence for structural change. These are identified as addressing inequality, decoupling development from growth and relocalising the economy. This policy analysis framework is designed for policies that integrate environmental, social and economic dimensions, for example Integrated Conservation and Development Projects, REDD+ programs as well as other all-encompassing policies.
The study of climate change communication has become an important research field. As stakeholders such as scientists, politicians, corporations, or NGOs increasingly turn to the Internet and social media for providing information and mobilizing support, and as an increasing number of people use these media, online communication on climate change and climate politics has become a relevant topic. This article reviews the available scholarly literature on the role of online and social media in climate communication. It analyzes how stakeholders use online communication strategically, showing, for example, that climate scientists and scientific institutions do not seem to be major players in online debates about climate change and climate politics. Furthermore, it highlights the characteristics of online climate communication, outlining, for example, that although (or because) many stakeholders participate online, this does not lead to robust scientific information or better debates. Eventually, the review assesses what is known about the uses and effects of online climate communication, showing that impacts on the broader public seem to be limited so far. Research desiderata are identified in the end, and directions for further studies are shown. WIREs Clim Change 2012, 3:527–543. doi: 10.1002/wcc.191
For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – comprised of top climate scientists from around the globe – has reached consensus that human activities have contributed significantly to global climate change. However, over time, the United States has refused to join concerted international efforts – such as the Kyoto Protocol – to curb human activities contributing to climate change. US newspaper and television media constitute key influences among a set of complex dynamics shaping information dissemination in this politicized environment. Mass-media coverage of climate change is not simply a random amalgam of newspaper articles and television segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news packages. This paper demonstrates that consistent adherence to interacting journalistic norms has contributed to impediments in the coverage of anthropogenic climate change science. Through analysis of US newspaper and television coverage of human contributions to climate change from 1988 through 2004, this paper finds that adherence to first-order journalistic norms – personalization, dramatization, and novelty – significantly influence the employment of second-order norms – authority-order and balance – and that this has led to informationally deficient mass-media coverage of this crucial issue. By critically scrutinizing US print and television media as a ‘public arena,’ we improve understanding of how journalistic activities have shaped interactions at the interface with climate science, policy and the public.
In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues--that is, the media may set the "agenda." of the campaign.
The greenhouse effect hypothesis is discussed. The effects of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere on global temperature changes are analyzed. The problems with models currently used to predict climatic changes are examined.
This paper discusses the potential role of Internet communication technologies, including social media, in the integrated reporting process. A media richness framework provides a conceptual basis to examine the features of Internet technologies, which can facilitate the important external communication aspect of integrated reporting. We find that Internet technologies possess rich features and capabilities that have potentially significant application in enhancing external communications with integrated reporting stakeholders. We also identify risks and challenges associated with utilising Internet technologies to enable the external communication aspect of integrated reporting. Through its focus on the potential role of Internet communication technologies in integrated reporting, the paper extends the nascent integrated reporting literature and accounting communications research. The paper also offers practical guidance and insights for business and accounting's integrated reporting communication practices. To our knowledge, this is the first conceptual paper to comprehensively examine the role of Internet communication technologies in integrated reporting.
Introduction 1. Modernisation, Environmental Problems and Chinese Society 2. Twenty-years of Environmental Investigative Reporting: Agendas, Social Interests and Voices 3. The Discourse of Risk: Environmental Problems and Environmentalism in Chinese Press Investigative Reports 4. Environmental Investigative Journalists and their Work 5. Offline Investigative Journalism and Online Environmental Crusades 6. Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony: Investigative Journalism between Modernisation and Environmental Problems Bibliography
Appreciable advances have been made in recent years in raising climate change awareness and enhancing support for climate and energy policies. There also has been considerable progress in understanding of how to effectively communicate climate change. This progress raises questions about the future directions of communication research and practice. What more is there to say? Through a selective literature review, focused on contributions since a similar stock‐taking exercise in 2010, ¹ the article delineates significant advances, emerging trends and topics, and tries to chart critical needs and opportunities going forward. It describes the climate communication landscape midway through the second decade of the 21st century to contextualize the challenges faced by climate change communication as a scientific field. Despite the important progress made on key scientific challenges laid out in 2010, persistent challenges remain (superficial public understanding of climate change, transitioning from awareness and concern to action, communicating in deeply politicized and polarized environments, and dealing with the growing sense of overwhelm and hopelessness). In addition, new challenges and topics have emerged that communication researchers and practitioners now face. The study reflects on the crucial need to improve the interaction between climate communication research and practice, and calls for dedicated science‐practice boundary work focused on climate change communication. A set of new charges to climate communicators and researchers are offered in hopes to move climate change communication to a new place—at once more humble yet also more ambitious than ever before, befitting to the crucial role it could play in the cultural work humanity faces with climate change. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:345–369. doi: 10.1002/wcc.403
This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication
Climate change has been widely reported as a scientific and environmental issue. In six months' news coverage of climate change in New Zealand, reporting of basic scientific facts was overwhelmingly accurate. News sources rated over 80% of stories no worse than slightly inaccurate. However, one story in six contained significant misreporting. Some stories overstated the advance of climate change or confused ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect. Scientific sources rated coverage overall worse than their own individual judgments showed it to be. Examination of ways in which stories came about leads to recommendations on how scientists and journalists can work together to better inform the public about climate change.
Global environmental issues are among the most serious problems facing humankind at the end of the 20th century. This research focuses on what people understand about climate change. It compares the New Zealand public's discourse on climate change with media coverage in the preceding year. Instances of overstatement, over-certainty and confusion in the media texts are identified and analysed. There remains considerable mismatch between media reporting of scientific information and the public's understanding of that information. People greatly overestimate scientific scenarios for temperature and sea-level rises, a reflection of public concern about global environmental risks. They confuse the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion, blending information in a fashion typical of comprehension meltdown between related topics. People know little about the causes of the greenhouse effect. This misunderstanding is socially and politically disabling because it misleads people away from dealing with an issue at the heart of western consumer society—the consumption of fossil fuels.
Press reporting is instrumental in creating public attitudes towards technological risk and related problems of health, and in shaping the policy agenda. This paper uses examples from the coverage of the health effects of dioxin, to explore some characteristics of risk reporting. It suggests how risk reporting reflects both, the constraints of journalism and the attitudes of scientists and industrial sources of information as they seek to manipulate press coverage of risk through increasingly sophisticated public relations.
Public understanding of global warming, also known as global climate change, is treated here as an example of a mass communication problem that has yet to be adequately solved. A survey of metropolitan area residents found that although people are aware of this problem in a general sense, understanding of particular causes, possible consequences, and solutions is more limited. Both mass media and interpersonal communication appear to make a positive contribution to understanding, as well as to perpetuating some popular misconceptions.
Communications regarding climate change are increasingly being utilised in order to encourage sustainable behaviour and the way that these are framed can significantly alter the impact that they have on the recipient. This experimental study seeks to investigate how transferable existing research findings on framing from health and behavioural research are to the climate change case. The study (N = 161) examined how framing the same information about climate change in terms of gain or loss outcomes and in terms of local or distant impacts can affect perceptions. Text on potential climate change impacts was adapted from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, alongside maps and images of potential flooding impacts. Participants then completed measures of various relevant socio-cognitive factors and questions assessing their responses to the information that they had received. Results indicated that, ceteris paribus, gain frames were superior to loss frames in increasing positive attitudes towards climate change mitigation, and also increased the perceived severity of climate change impacts. However, third variable analyses demonstrated that the superiority of the gain frame was partially suppressed by lower fear responses and poorer information recall within gain framed information. In addition, framing climate change impacts as distant (whilst keeping information presented the same) resulted in climate change impacts being perceived as more severe, whilst attitudes towards climate change mitigation were more positive when participants were asked to consider social rather than personal aspects of climate change. Implications for designing communications about climate change are outlined.
This two-part study integrates a quantitative review of one year of US newspaper coverage of climate science with a qualitative, comparative analysis of media-created themes and frames using a social constructivist approach. In addition to an examination of newspaper articles, this paper includes a reflexive comparison with attendant wire stories and scientific texts. Special attention is given to articles constructed with and framed by rhetoric emphasising uncertainty, controversy, and climate scepticism.
Research on framing is characterized by theoretical and empirical vagueness. This is due, in part, to the lack of a commonly shared theoretical model underlying framing research. Conceptual problems translate into operational problems, limiting the comparability of instruments and results. In this paper I systematize the fragmented approaches to framing in political communication and integrate them into a comprehensive model. I classify previous approaches to framing research along two dimensions: the type of frame examined (media frames vs. audience frames) and the way frames are operationalized (independent variable or dependent variable). I develop a process model of framing, identifying four key processes that should be addressed in future research: frame building, frame setting, individual-level processes of framing, and a feedback loop from audiences to journalists.
Global change issues are complex and the consequences of decisions are often highly uncertain. The large spatial and temporal scales and stakes involved make it important to take account of present and potential consequences in decision-making. Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty require information about the likelihood of alternative states, how states and actions combine to form outcomes and the net benefits of different outcomes. For global change issues, however, the set of potential states is often unknown, much less the probabilities, effect of actions or their net benefits. Decision theory, thresholds, scenarios and resilience thinking can expand awareness of the potential states and outcomes, as well as of the probabilities and consequences of outcomes under alternative decisions.
Sumario: The new environmental conflict -- Discourse analysis -- The historical roots of ecological modernization -- Accumulating knowledge, accumulating pollution?. Ecological modernization in the United Kingdom -- The micro-powers of apocalypse: ecological modernization in the Netherlands -- Ecological modernization: discourse and institutional change Bibliografía: P. 297-318
Estudio sobre la progresiva toma de conciencia de los problemas y dimensiones ambientales -o la ausencia de esta conciencia- en el pensamiento y las teorías de las ciencias sociales en Francia durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. En el contexto de un argumento que defiende la dimensión ambiental como un componente indispensable del pensamiento social en los años próximos al siglo XXI, las raíces de las preocupaciones ecológicas-sociales son situadas en el clima intelectual de fines de la década de 1950 y del siguiente decenio, cuando los principales intelectuales del año clave de 1968 modificaron completamente las formas como se piensa el mundo. Revisiones de trabajos de Luc Ferry, Jean Baudrillard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, Michael Serres, Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel de Certeau, Hélène Cixous y Luce Irigaray forman parte de esta reevaluación de la presencia de una conciencia ambiental en los planteamientos del postestructuralismo, del encuentro entre el ecologismo y el feminismo y en suma, de esta reivindicación del componente ecológico en el pensamiento social francés del período de la Quinta República.
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