Communicating climate futures: a multi-country study of how the media portray the IPCC scenarios in the 2021/2 Working Group reports

Abstract

The way governments and policy makers think about climate futures has a wide-ranging impact on how they formulate policy and plan for climate change impacts. In the lead-up to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), the IPCC adopted a new scenarios framework that aimed to provide a fuller picture of the interacting elements and policy choices that affect climate change. However, these scenarios, known as Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), are complex and difficult to communicate. Most audiences, including policy makers, receive much of their information about climate change from mainstream media, and particularly online news sites. We therefore examined the five most popular online news sites in the UK and the USA, five popular English-language news sites in India, English-language news media from a wide range of African countries, and the Reuters News agency. Based on manual content analysis to assess 252 articles, we identify several important findings, amongst them: in all countries, the media provide little detailed explanation of how scenarios are developed, very little mention of SSPs, and virtually no detailed explanations of them; generally, journalists use the words ‘projections’, ‘futures’, and ‘pathways’ when talking about the IPCC scenarios, although some usage of ‘predictions’ or ‘forecasts’ is apparent; contrary to previous research, there were very few doomsday narratives such as ‘only 12 years to act’. We conclude by drawing out some implications for more effective communication of the IPCC scenarios.