“Climate change doesn’t communicate itself” is a lesson only partially learned after decades of research on the topic.
According to the United Nations (UN), communicating climate change “is about educating and mobilizing audiences to take action,” a key lever for driving broader change to address and mitigate the climate crisis. Yet such communication has been long neglected by both climate change researchers and the media, and it continues to prove challenging today.
Even into the 21st century, public outreach about climate change was undertaken by only a few scientists. Academic training for such outreach was not a priority, and scientific discourse was regarded as too technical for untrained audiences. In addition, the news media’s attention to and coverage of climate change were minimal, and the latter was often limited to portraying incomplete and misleading debates.
Starting about 15 years ago, however, public communication has increasingly been regarded by many climate change scientists as integral to their job—part of a commitment to popularize a topic they see as important and as a response to incentives by funders and universities. A dedicated field of research, building upon insights from the social sciences, has emerged with the objective of alleviating barriers and challenges in climate change communication. Organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and UN have created training materials to guide more effective communication, helping scientists to develop clearer framing and narratives and to convey uncertainties.
More recently, media attention to climate change issues reached record levels in 2021 and 2022, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, which tracks the numbers of related stories appearing in news sources around the world. Initiatives by journalists such as Covering Climate Now, which includes more than 500 news and media partner organizations across dozens of countries, have raised commitments from newsrooms to “drive a public conversation that creates an engaged public.”
If the ultimate purpose of coverage of climate change science is to breed action, then delivering information, even if done well, is not sufficient.
As more scientists are actively communicating research findings in climate change science and newsrooms are eager to report on such findings, there is an ideal opportunity to reach the public, especially those for whom news media remain highly trusted sources of information. But does the current approach to such communication achieve its goals of engaging, educating, and mobilizing audiences?
More news coverage of climate change science, reported with intelligible and compelling storytelling, is certainly necessary for raising public awareness. But if the ultimate purpose of this coverage is to breed action, then delivering information, even if done well, is not sufficient: 78% of European citizens consider climate change a very serious problem, for example, but very few are willing to make major lifestyle changes to address it. We argue that the criteria by which research findings in climate science are judged as newsworthy are not aligned with those likely to make climate change communication efficient and transformative.
Problems of Current Climate Change Coverage
Mediatization of climate change science—that is, the outward communication of climate change research findings through the mass media—involves selecting which scientific articles are newsworthy. Media outlets’ criteria for newsworthiness thus shape which scientific information is presented to the public.
A recent survey of more than 51,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles related to climate change published in 2020, along with roughly 36,000 mentions of those papers in international media outlets, revealed that this filtering is so stringent that only a narrow and limited facet of climate change research is showcased [Perga et al., 2023].
In short, news media depict climate change research as a sentinel and whistleblower for large-scale, observed, or end-of-the-century consequences of climate change for Earth’s natural systems. Studies of shrinking glaciers and melting sea ice are very popular topics for coverage, for example, and papers on megadrought, the longer lifetimes of hurricanes in a warming world, and the survival of polar bear populations to the end of this century all ranked in the top 10 most covered studies of 2020.
On the other hand, human, technological, and social aspects of climate change science—such as quantified assessments of the future of aviation in a carbon-neutral world—as well as local and short-term processes and solutions are rarely presented in the media [Perga et al., 2023].
Conventional mediatization of climate change research perpetuates perceptions that climate change is mostly a global biophysical problem, undermining how socioeconomic, justice, philosophical, and technological dimensions are key to creating solutions for mitigation and adaptation. This bias in media reporting was found, for example, to result in systematic underreporting in the United Kingdom and United States on Working Group III’s contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, which focuses on climate change mitigation.
The problem is that this monolithic, biophysically centered portrayal of climate change research in the media overwhelmingly focuses on breaking news that points to the severity of climate change now or in the future. This approach drives many people to avoid, neglect, minimize, or discount threatening information, and it reinforces known motivational and cognitive barriers to individual and collective action. For example, the selective exposure effect refers to the tendency for individuals or groups to seek information confirming existing beliefs or interests. This effect implies that people also tend to avoid or ignore inconvenient truths, just as many smokers ignore anti-tobacco messaging and carry on their behavior.
Long-term and large-scale portrayals of climate change can depict it as happening far away in space and time, creating an emotional and psychological distance that may reduce people’s motivation to process and to accept information.
For media consumers, long-term and large-scale portrayals of climate change can depict it as happening far away in space and time, creating an emotional and psychological distance that may reduce people’s motivation to process and to accept information. Conversely, discussions of the local aspects or effects of climate change can instill concern and elicit stronger personal processing of information, yet these discussions have been virtually absent in the news media. As a result, even if the media successfully expose readers to climate change research and popularize the idea that climate change is a problem to be addressed, this exposure does not necessarily convert into action, however catastrophic the portrayal of the future.
Another major psychological barrier that limits proenvironmental behaviors and climate action is that individuals and groups often don’t feel empowered to act. Preferentially emphasizing the global-scale consequences of climate change, which in the long term appear as though they are determined only by national and international policies (i.e., as modeled in the different IPCC scenarios) or even by other countries, may reduce public perceptions of collective efficacy. Even if media consumers absorb broadcasted content about climate change and feel concerned and capable of acting, it is not a given that they will act. Individuals may not act because the task of influencing change may appear overwhelming or simply a waste of time if they think other people in other places—normally envisaged as “other countries”—are not also going to act.
If the purpose of communicating climate research findings is to breed public action, then we are missing our target.
A Self-Reinforcing Symbiosis
Selectivity for newsworthiness occurs in different venues: among scientists and press offices at academic institutions, at publishers and by scientific journals in which scholarly papers are published, and in newsrooms and mass media agencies. The promotional culture and symbiosis among these groups likely explains why climate change communication via the media remains biased toward certain disciplines, spatial scales, and timescales.
Media outlets are not just groups of benevolent journalists seeking to inform society but also must raise revenue. University press offices do not exist simply to promote their researchers’ work but also to elevate the profile of their institutions. And scholarly journals are interested not only in disseminating cutting-edge research but also in raising revenue through subscriptions and submissions and in priming the metrics that drive the academic publication industry (e.g., impact factors).
Newsrooms frequently rely on press releases they receive from scientific institutions and publishers and judge the newsworthiness of research on the basis of the reputation and name recognition of the journal in which it was published. Journal impact factors especially are strong predictors of newsworthiness, sometimes more so than the contents of articles. Perga et al. [2023] found that in 2020, more than 40% of news coverage of climate change research originated from studies in just six high-profile journals—three from the Nature portfolio and two published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, along with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The editorial choices of high-profile multidisciplinary journals largely dictate what news readers hear about climate change research.
The editorial choices of those high-profile multidisciplinary journals—favoring bio- and geosciences over social science, engineering, humanities, and agriculture and focusing on global versus local scales—thus largely dictate what news the public receives about climate change research. The high degree of redundancy in the reporting of scientific articles within the news media, by which a few articles receive a disproportionate amount of attention, also contributes to the limited diversity of information to which readers are exposed.
Further, high-profile journals—some of which operate under for-profit business models—are most likely to rely on strong press offices, to maintain professionalized press relations, and to promote papers through press releases and commentaries and therefore to attract news media attention. As scientists and academic press offices often dedicate more effort to publicizing research appearing in those same top-tier journals, this loop among institutions, publishers, and the media becomes self-reinforcing—and limits the scope of research that is communicated to the public.
Reshaping media coverage of climate change research to inspire action will require the gatekeepers of mediatization to revisit their agendas and approaches. A failure to do so could be seen as a form of greenwashing: claiming a contribution to addressing the climate change challenge by disseminating news about recent research when the real motivation is selling journals and raising institutional profiles.
Reimagining the Mediatization Model
There are levers to pull on the media side that could help with the needed transformation. These levers include increasing resources to produce more (and more varied) climate coverage, encouraging universities and research organizations to reprioritize the work their press offices push, and providing reporters with extended training on—and incentivizing coverage of—multidisciplinary aspects of climate change science (including, e.g., technological, socioeconomic, and justice aspects).
In addition, as solutions-oriented journalism commonly experiences lower levels of cognitive resistance, media coverage should move away from repeatedly focusing on how problematic and severe human-induced climate change is and should instead demonstrate potential ways both to reduce it and to live with it. This coverage must objectively discuss even unpopular aspects of solutions—such as the socioeconomic and environmental costs of mining for raw materials to power clean energy sources—and report on both the efficiencies and inefficiencies of proposed ideas.
Remarkable initiatives taking hold in journalism that name and aim to overcome limitations of traditional media models for climate coverage are encouraging signs of progress.
Furthermore, portrayals of climate change as a global issue should be balanced with place-based communication describing local concerns, impacts, and attempted solutions, which has the potential to resonate more deeply with people and to advance climate initiatives. Remarkable initiatives taking hold in journalism that name and aim to overcome limitations of traditional media models for climate coverage are encouraging signs of progress.
On the institutional and publishing side, academics must assert more control over what climate change–related research is mediatized. The highest-profile journals have disproportionate power in deciding what is newsworthy, and their editorial choices about what research to publish and promote may not always align with the key criterion of news usefulness. Getting control over what is communicated to raise public engagement requires deflating the power delegated to the publishers and editorial boards of high-profile journals. Reinforcing publications and communications in journals owned by scientific societies, whose editorial boards comprise active academics, is a critical lever to do this.
If the usefulness of media coverage of climate change is defined as the ability to engage society in climate action, then the ecosystem of people and organizations involved must work to publish and mediatize more solution-oriented, locally focused, and interdisciplinary research. The resulting coverage must account for the public’s prevailing concerns and resistance to change. In this way, researchers, journals, and news professionals may improve their collaboration and move from being whistleblowers of the problems of climate change to being part of the solution.
References
Perga, M.-E., et al. (2023), The climate change research that makes the front page: Is it fit to engage societal action?, Global Environ. Change, 80, 102675, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102675.
Author Information
Marie-Elodie Perga ([email protected]), Laure-Anne Pessina, Stuart Lane, and Fabrizio Butera, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland