Scientists and politicians are increasingly using the language of risk to describe the climate change challenge. Some researchers have argued that stressing the 'risks' posed by climate change rather than the 'uncertainties' can create a more helpful context for policy makers and a stronger response from the public. However, understanding the concepts of risk and uncertainty - and how to communicate them - is a hotly debated issue. In this book, James Painter analyses how the international media present these and other narratives surrounding climate change. He focuses on the coverage of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the melting ice of the Arctic Sea, and includes six countries: Australia, France, India, Norway, the UK and the USA.

This book looks at the media’s coverage of Climate Change and investigates its role in representing the complex realities of climate uncertainties and its effects on communities and the environment. This book explores the socioeconomic and cultural understanding of climate issues and the influence of environment communication via the news and the public response to it. It also examines the position of the media as a facilitator between scientists, policy makers and the public. Drawing extensively from case studies, personal interviews, comparative analysis of international climate coverage and a close reading of newspaper reports and archives, the author studies the pattern and frequency of climate coverage in the Indian media and their outcomes. With a special focus on the Western Ghats, the book discusses the political rhetoric, policy parameters and events that trigger a debate about development over biodiversity crisis and environmental risks in India. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of environmental studies, especially Climate Change, media studies, public policy and South Asian studies, as well as conscientious citizens who deeply care for the environment.

Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity. This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy – ‘facilitative’ and ‘radical’ roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis. This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media.

This edited collection addresses climate change journalism from the perspective of temporality, showcasing how various time scales—from geology, meteorology, politics, journalism, and lived cultures—interact with journalism around the world. Analyzing the meetings of and schisms between various temporalities as they emerge from reporting on climate change globally, Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time asks how climate change as a temporal process gets inscribed within the temporalities of journalism. The overarching question of climate change journalism and its relationship to temporality is considered through the themes of environmental justice and slow violence, editorial interventions, ecological loss, and political and religious contexts, which are in turn explored through a selection of case studies from the US, France, Thailand, Brazil, Australia, Spain, Mexico, Canada, and the UK. This is an insightful resource for students and scholars in the fields of journalism, media studies, environmental communication, and communications generally.

For many years, the objective of environmental campaigners was to push climate change on to the agenda of political leaders and to encourage media attention to the issue. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it appeared that their efforts had been spectacularly successful. Yet just at the moment when the campaigners’ goals were being achieved, it seemed that the idea of getting the issue into mainstream discussion had been mistaken all along; that the consensus-building approach produced little or no meaningful action. That is the problem of climate change as a ‘post-political’ issue, which is the subject of this book. Examining how climate change is communicated in politics, news media and celebrity culture, Climate Change and Post-Political Communication explores how the issue has been taken up by elites as potentially offering a sense of purpose or mission in the absence of political visions of the future, and considers the ways in which it provides a focus for much broader anxieties about a loss of modernist political agency and meaning. Drawing on a wide range of literature and case studies, and taking a critical and contextual approach to the analysis of climate change communication, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental studies, communication studies, and media and film studies.

This study makes sense of how the media report on climate change and how this influences science and policy decision-making.

Mediating Climate Change explores how practices of mediation and visualisation shape how we think about, address and act upon climate change. Through historical and contemporary case studies drawn from science, media, politics and culture, Doyle identifies the representational problems climate change poses for public and political debate. She explores how climate change can be made more meaningful and calls for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations.

Research on media coverage of climate change, as a particular subfield of environmental communication research, has proliferated over the past decade. This book sets out to consider what conclusions can be drawn in light of the existing body of work, what lessons can be learnt, what are the challenges to be met, and what are the directions to be taken in order to further develop media research on climate change. The mixture of articles in this volume serve well to illustrate the range of empirical, theoretical, and methodological approaches subsumed under the broad heading of "media studies on climate change." Some contributions focus on the past—how the subfield has developed and what we can learn from that—and some look toward the future. Either way, all the authors share the ambition to suggest important avenues of research, be they centered on media, context, applicability of results, or theoretical advancement. As such they make a valuable contribution to identifying important directions for future research on the role of the media in communicating climate change. This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental Communication.