Media Coverage of Climate Science Is Stunting Climate Action, Especially in US
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change plays an enormous role in shaping how climate science gets translated into policy in countries around the world, but so does the media.
A new report finds that, while the IPCCcould have managed the rollout of itsFifth Assessment Report (AR5) better, lack of compelling coverage, especially in US media, is leading to less public demand for action and hence political will to adopt policies to deal with climate change.
The report, published in Nature Climate Change, examines how theIPCC’s release strategy around AR5 contributed to diminishing returns in terms of media coverage, as well as the ways media outlets chose to frame the issue and how that impacts public perception of climate issues.
Researchers with the University of Exeter studied print, broadcast, and online media in both the US and the UK and found that the biggest difference was that there is simply more climate coverage in the UK. A lot more: three times as many articles and five times as many broadcasts were dedicated to climate change in theUK as in the US.
There’s not just more climate coverage in the UK, but less divisive coverage, too, largely due to the fact that the climate is such a partisan issue in the US, which is not as true in the UK. (Although that’s changing quickly, as our colleagues atDeSmog UK investigate every day.)
The IPCC chose to release each of the three individual Working Group reports that make up AR5 sequentially, releasing WG1 (The Physical Science Basis) in Autumn 2013, with WG2 (Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability) and WG3 (Mitigation of Climate Change) released close together in Spring 2014.
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