Abstract
AbstractClimate change will rob future generations—today's children and those yet to be born—of the stable climate that previous generations have enjoyed. The article explores how future generations are represented in climate change coverage in the UK national press. We examine the ‘popular’ (Mail, Mirror) and ‘quality’ (Guardian, Telegraph) press from 2010 to March 2019. We found that little attention was given to future generations; young people rarely spoke and, along with those yet to be born, were represented in ways that obscured the temporal and social inequalities that are built into climate change.
Highlights
Climate change is among the world's most urgent challenges
Donald Trump's withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Climate Agreement caused a spike in climate change coverage referring to future generations: 12% of the articles were linked to this event
The continued increase in carbon emissions and global temperatures mean that today's and tomorrow's children will live on a planet very different to the one the current generation of adults have taken for granted
Summary
Climate change is among the world's most urgent challenges. While changes in the Earth's climate systems have been evident since the 19th century, the pace and scale of change has increased sharply since 1950. Driven by high-income societies, fossil fuel consumption, the major driver of climate change, has increased and, with it, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and global temperatures (Hansen et al, 2013; World Meteorological Organization, 2020). The failure to halt the rise in fossil fuel emissions and atmospheric CO2 means that today's adults risk leaving behind a climate system that places future generations in jeopardy (Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney, & Ludwig, 2015).
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