International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2013

Climate change is an issue with fundamental implications for societies and individuals. These implications range from our everyday choices about resource use and lifestyles, through how we adjust to an unprecedented rate of environmental change, to our role in debating and enacting accompanying social transitions. This article outlines the various ways in which members of society (‘publics’) may be engaged in efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and then provides a synthesis of lessons about public engagement which span both theoretical and practical insights. These include the diverse drivers of, and barriers to, engagement; the importance of multiple forms of engagement and messages; and a critical need to evaluate and identify successful examples of engagement. We conclude by outlining priorities for future research, policy and practice.

Based on focus groups with young people in England and Scotland and in-depth interviews with journalists, communication professionals and campaigners, this article examines how UK youths perceive climate change issues and how they receive climate messages from the news media and other communication forms. We found a strong sense of pessimism and disempowerment among our participants and identified a set of ‘triple-R reasons’ for their disengagement and inaction – namely the lack of relevance, resources and rituals. In that context, the media and other major communication forms have tended to hinder rather than help our young participants to be more actively involved and engaged – due mainly to the lack of positive and relevant messages and the focus on the extreme and the controversial.

Media reporting and analysis of climate-change science is a fundamental and vital requirement for public understanding and engagement in the increasingly serious issue of global climate change. However, journalists have largely failed to come to grips with the science and its practitioners: they have generally failed to obtain an adequate understanding of what the science is about, they have used inappropriate reporting and framing techniques and have been unduly influenced by vested interests. The result is that media audiences have been left confused, apathetic and even hostile about climate-change news. This article analyses the major shortcomings in media reporting of climate-change science and proposes means by which journalists can, without great difficulty, better serve their audiences, their organizations and themselves in this area of major professional importance.

The article examines the issue of climate change and its importance to Italian politics. In particular, the authors analyse whether political parties and their leaders give due importance to the issues in their party literature and speeches. In order to investigate this phenomenon, the authors studied manifestos of those political parties represented in Parliament between 2008 and 2013, other official documents available on their websites and official statements of political leaders. The overall picture emerging is a substantial lack of attention paid to climate change, which is also poorly represented in the Italian media. One of the key problems, however, lies in what we define as the ‘global’ dimension of the climate change debate that makes it look unattractive to local political discourse (where Italian politics is traditionally rooted). We argue this impacts negatively on public opinion and the lack of Italian public policies aimed at ensuring sustainability and promoting good behaviour and environmental best practice.

Within the framework of the UN’s Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (2005–14), this article explores the potential of a Holistic, future-Oriented, Participatory and Empowering (HOPE) model for framing climate change in the media. A small-scale content analysis of three leading Thai dailies shows that most climate change stories have some, but not all, elements of HOPE. Follow-up in-depth interviews with Thai journalists and climate experts suggest that this is due to issues related to the practicality of implementing HOPE, especially day-to-day constraints on newswork – such as editors’ attitudes, editorial policies, newsroom resources. Finally, a focus group with Thai students finds that while audience members appreciate articles with all four HOPE elements, they think that a climate change story does not need to entail all elements to attract them, in part because it is not only the content but also its reporting style and form that make a story appealing. All in all, there is a general agreement that HOPE could serve as an ideal set of criteria for journalists to use as a guideline in framing climate change stories.

Scientists working in Antarctica have recognized the need to counteract problems associated with mainstream media’s treatment of the climate-change crisis. For this reason, several of them have assumed the role of citizen journalists in order to report on the effects of global warming first-hand. More specifically, they have chosen to communicate directly with the general public through official or personal blogs. In so doing they are capitalizing on the way the Internet is changing science news and journalism. This article draws on an analysis of more than 50 Antarctic blogs published during the International Polar Year (2007–08), as well as data from e-interviews with a broad selection of bloggers, in order to examine how scientists ‘on the ice’ act as citizen journalists. The article explores the idea of citizen journalism as education and the extent to which the scientists achieve an unmediated form of communication through their blogging efforts. It concludes by suggesting this new form of citizen journalism, beyond raising people’s awareness of the climate-change crisis, also signals an important way in which mainstream environmental reporting can be reinvigorated.