Frames in Media Coverage of Climate Futures

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on debates on Twitter relating to climate change. Future scenarios are essential for climate change research, and the journalistic framing of such futures is critical for the public understanding of climate change threats. For Germany, the US, South Africa, and India, the project examined some 56,000 articles on climate change from 2017 to 2020, covering a broad range of media outlets.

But not all such articles were covering climate change in depth or discussing future scenarios; there was a need to extract articles covering climate change future scenarios from this dataset, and the project developed a dictionary derivation approach that identified different layers of language within these articles through manual coding of a subset of articles and the identification of the keywords co-occurring specifically in text segments discussing climate futures.

It was not possible to automatically the specific journalistic frames that were present in these climate future stories, however; this still requires human coding. These frames broadly fell into a matrix of distant to close, and problem- to solution oriented; two clusters of articles covered climate futures as distant threats to humanity or distant threats to ecosystems; another two focussed on solutions to climatic and social consequences, or on economic opportunities in mitigating climate change. These patterns weren’t particularly different across the four countries in this study.

Little in this coverage seemed to directly motivate people to act on climate change, however – which is a substantially different pattern from social media patterns, where calls for action are considerably more common.