Introduction: Critical Challenges in Communicating Climate Change

Abstract

Language matters. In May 2019, The Guardian, a progressive news outlet in the United Kingdom, announced it was changing its “home style” of how to report on changes to global climates. Instead of ‘climate change,’ the website and newspaper reported, “the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favored over ‘global warming’, although the original terms are not banned” (Carrington, 2019a). In explaining the changes in approved terminology to be used in news reporting, Guardian editor Katharine Viner said, “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue” and that “[t]he phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.” Newsroom decisions to use terms such as “crisis,” “emergency,” “breakdown,” and others present new challenges for scholars seeking to understand the variables that impact mediated communication of changing climates and associated impacts around the world. Journalists must navigate not only the complex science around accelerating climate change, but also the politics, cultural shifts, technological innovations and commercial pressures that can influence publics’ reception of such information. As news organizations struggle to cover climate change in an era of shrinking newsrooms and politicized rhetoric, old assumptions and definitions of climate change as an activist issue, a purely scientific or environmental beat, or an event-driven issue must be revisited. So, too, must be scrutinized the machinations of power and hegemony, and the structural inequalities underlying how these issues are constructed, disseminated, and received. And the scientific and political contexts surrounding climate change can also facilitate coverage that overwhelming frames it as a controversy or danger, use emotion-laden terms, or emphasize politics over information that can help communities build resiliency. Increasingly, dire scientific reports on worsening climate change continue to make international news, but with different emphases for various publics (or audiences, which The Guardian example highlights), understanding the potential to save the planet becomes complicated. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s