Climate Change Communication Research Research Articles

Climate Justice and Other News Frames in the Coverage of Climate Change in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa

ABSTRACT Media and communication scholars have studied climate change from many perspectives. However, much of the scholarship has focused on Western countries, with limited attention paid to African countries. This study expands climate change communication research by examining framing devices used by prominent newspapers in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. A content analysis of 342 newspaper articles published in Daily Nation (Kenya), Punch (Nigeria) and The Sunday Times (South Africa) in 2021 reveals prominence in framing of climate change as threat to human lives and livelihood, human causes of climate change, a need for climate justice, and remedies in the form of adaptation across the three countries. Differences across the three countries are also noted. For example, even though all three newspapers highlighted climate justice in their coverage, proportionally, this was higher in the Sunday Times than in Daily Nation and Punch. Other differences and implications are also discussed.

Climate Change Communication Research for Action as a Design Issue

Climate Change Communication Research for Action as a Design Issue

An Analysis of Publications on Climate Change Communication Using a Bibliometric Lens

The effectiveness of climate change communication is incommunicado when there is a lack of comprehensive efforts to increase public knowledge and encourage proactive steps. The main objective of this study is to examine the evolving trends in publication and the developmental trajectory within climate change communication research, development, and publications. This study utilised datasets from the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases, which were further analysed using the ScientoPy and VOSviewer. The findings suggest that there has been a notable increase in the number of publications since 2008, particularly in the WoS database, indicating a growing recognition and a more focused endeavour by researchers to delve into climate change communication. The most frequent keywords employed by past researchers were “Climate Change”, “Climate Change communication”, and “Climate communication”. The emergence of keywords such as “social media”, “science communication”, “environmental communication”, “framing”, and “climate action” in the year 2020 onwards signifies their recent prominence. Examining research growth and trends in climate change communication provides valuable insights into the advancements, recurring topics, and prominent individuals within this discipline. In a nutshell, the current study highlights the significance of proficient communication in tackling the intricate issues associated with climate change that can be a reference to potential readers and future researchers keen on this domain.

Cross-Country Analysis of the Association between Media Coverage and Exposure to Climate News with Awareness, Risk Perceptions, and Protest Participation Intention in 110 Countries

ABSTRACT Few studies analyze international media coverage of climate change, and few still explore media's role in public opinion about climate change from a comparative perspective. Using data from the 2022 Yale Meta survey of 108,946 Facebook monthly active users from 110 countries and territories, the current research finds that perceived awareness is associated with perceived personal and future risks but not protest participation intention. Only perceived personal harm was associated with protest intention. People in countries most exposed to climate-related impacts were more likely to show heightened perceptions of harm to self and future generations. An analysis of a subset of countries (n = 52) where media coverage data was externally available for 2015–2022 indicates that media coverage is positively associated with self-reported exposure to climate change and perceived awareness about the issue. However, media coverage is not related to perceived personal or future risks and is negatively associated with protest participation intent across countries. Despite low media coverage of climate change, citizens in poor and developing countries see climate change as a greater risk and are more willing to participate in protests compared to citizens in developed countries. Findings help clarify theoretical and practical implications for climate change communication research.

Visualizing the structure and development of climate change communication research

To better understand the structure, development, and function of the climate change communication knowledge domain, we performed time-evolving bibliometric mapping and topic modeling on 2,995 climate change communication publications from Web of Science. Structural and visual representations of scholarship are useful for identifying areas of opportunity and coordinating effort in interdisciplinary and action-oriented knowledge domains. Our analysis reveals a cohesive and dense yet ossified knowledge structure which suggests that while a systems approach is being applied in climate communication, there is a need to explore more constitutive strategies for the communication of climate change.

Dispersion and Disparity: Bibliometric and Visualized Analysis of Research on Climate Change Science Communication

Research on climate change science communication began in the 1980s and is showing continued vitality and a wider interest at present. In order to track the development of global research on the communication of climate change hot topics and frontier progress since the 21st century, methods such as bibliometrics and co-word network analysis were used to analyze the publication of research papers in this field, and a total of 1175 valid papers published in 2000-2021 in the WOS core database were counted. Different dimensions such as temporal trend, spatial distribution, and author collaboration network were analyzed. The results show that, (1) climate change communication research has become a relatively independent research field and has entered a rapid development stage, and this field still has a broad research prospect in the new understanding of climate change and new international context. (2) At present, research in this field is still dominated by developed countries, but developing countries are actively building their unique climate communication discourse. (3) Public understanding and media information presentation have been hot topics in climate communication research in recent years. In the context of changing international situations and the development of global epidemics and new climate policies, changes in national actions will likely lead to new research topics and dialogues. Research shows that climate change science communication research is increasingly showing a trend of decentralization and differentiation.

Evolution of the Knowledge Mapping of Climate Change Communication Research: Basic Status, Research Hotspots, and Prospects.

Climate change communication is a crucial strategy for addressing the major challenges of climate change, and the knowledge mapping analysis and overview of it helps to clarify research progress. Based on CiteSpace, 428 pieces of domestic and foreign literature are collected to clarify the basic status of climate change communication research and summarize research hotspots and prospects. The study found that: (1) The earliest traceable English literature on climate change communication appeared in 2000. The number of articles published has risen steadily since 2008, reaching its first peak in 2015. (2) In contrast, research into Chinese climate change communication began late and progressed slowly. The Chinese literature on climate change communication first appeared in 2009. Although domestic research generally continues to pay attention to this phenomenon, there is still room for development compared with international research. (3) The research hotspots for climate change communication are obtained through keyword co-occurrence analysis. Public perceptions of climate change are strongly influenced by political ideology. Since climate change has political attributes, people from different political parties or groups form their views on climate change through identity protection. (4) The research content on climate change communication can be summarized into the following six aspects: the development of climate change communication research; differences in public perceptions of climate change; factors influencing climate change communication; key elements of the climate change communication process; the important role of the media in climate change communication; and effective strategies for climate change communication. Finally, the shortcomings of this study are summarized and future research prospects on climate change communication are put forward from the perspectives of research methods, research contexts, and research paradigms.

The persuasiveness of gain vs. loss framed messages on farmers’ perceptions and decisions to climate change: A case study in coastal communities of Vietnam

Ongoing climate change results in a large increase in damaging climatic events that affect people’s health, environment, biodiversity, and food security. One of the most vulnerable sectors to climate change is agriculture because farming relies heavily on planning for weather and seasons according to experience of past years, and therefore changes in seasons and unusual weather patterns lead to loss of crops or livestock. Responding to climate change impacts requires both mitigation and adaptation, in which communication plays an important role to raise awareness, change behaviours and gain policy support. Gain vs. loss message framing has been extensively studied in persuasive communication. Despite successful examples in risk communication, the effect of gain vs. loss message framing method in communicating climate change, a psychologically distant risk, is still not well understood. This study combines message persuasiveness with psychological distance to develop messages to encourage farmers on climate adaptation. We applied a 2 × 2 factorial design (gain/loss and abstract/concrete framed messages) and conducted the research in a coastal farming community (N = 368). Findings confirm that gain-framed messages are more effective in raising risk perceptions and efficacy, with stronger impact on behavioural intentions toward climate change, compared to loss-framed messages. Above all, farmers were more willing to take adaptation measures when exposed to gain- in combination with concrete-framed messages vs. loss- and abstract-framed. Implications for climate change communication research and practice are discussed.

Messaging on Slow Impacts: Applying Lessons Learned from Climate Change Communication to Catalyze and Improve Marine Nutrient Communication.

Building publics’ understanding about human-environmental causes and impacts of nutrient pollution is difficult due to the diverse sources and, at times, extended timescales of increasing inputs, consequences to ecosystems, and recovery after remediation. Communicating environmental problems with “slow impacts” has long been a challenge for scientists, public health officials, and science communicators, as the time delay for subsequent consequences to become evident dilutes the sense of urgency to act. Fortunately, scientific research and practice in the field of climate change communication has begun to identify best practices to address these challenges. Climate change demonstrates a delay between environmental stressor and impact, and recommended practices for climate change communication illustrate how to explain and motivate action around this complex environmental problem. Climate change communication research provides scientific understanding of how people evaluate risk and scientific information about climate change. We used a qualitative coding approach to review the science communication and climate change communication literature to identify approaches that could be used for nutrients and how they could be applied. Recognizing the differences between climate change and impacts of nutrient pollution, we also explore how environmental problems with delayed impacts demand nuanced strategies for effective communication and public engagement. Applying generalizable approaches to successfully communicate the slow impacts related to nutrient pollution across geographic contexts will help build publics’ understanding and urgency to act on comprehensive management of nutrient pollution, thereby increasing protection of coastal and marine environments.

Il ruolo dei medici nella comunicazione del cambiamento climatico: informazione, partecipazione e formazione.

The objective of this article is to examine the role of doctors and health professionals in communicating the health impacts of climate change and exploring how achieving climate objectives is co-beneficial to public health objectives. This article identifies the main interpretative frameworks for climate change communication identified in the literature, contextualizes the challenge of climate communication in the field of public health, and analyses the element of trust, without which the communication process is likely to fail. Awareness-raising strategies must therefore create appropriate contexts that allow the public to perceive climate change as a relevant and immediate issue. Further, to be properly considered, such information must be issued from a source the public trusts. After providing a general framework within which to examine the role of doctors and health professionals in climate communication, message content is examined along with trust in message sources and in the medical profession, and the perceptions among and training of medical professionals concerning the climate challenge are considered.The literature reviewed in this article represents the body of climate change communication research related to the role of the doctor, an area of growing interest. This review provides a timely and complete analysis of the literature on the subject with the goal of starting a necessary, but too-long postponed, multidisciplinary dialogue.

Focus groups and serious gaming in climate change communication research—A methodological review

AbstractThis article explores the methodological challenges and opportunities of climate change communication research in a digital landscape. It scrutinizes the potential and limitations of combining group‐based qualitative interview methods, such as focus groups, with new digital media tools such as serious games. The paper brings together three strands of research: Climate change communication studies, methods literature on focus groups, and literature on (digital) serious gaming. Our review demonstrates that studies that deliberately combine focus groups methods with serious gaming have hitherto been scarce. There is a proliferation of digital visualization tools in climate change communication. We therefore see the need to critically explore what and how the integration of digital tools into qualitative group‐based studies can contribute to enhancing research into climate change communication and knowledge development. To illuminate the opportunities and challenges for the integration of serious gaming in focus group studies in the area of climate change communication, we bring in a few illustrative examples from a research project that integrated focus group methodology with a serious game on climate adaptation in Nordic agriculture. Introducing digital serious games in focus group‐based climate change communication studies can benefit climate change communication research in at least three ways: (a) by spurring participants’ in‐depth discussions, facilitating analysis of how sense‐making occurs; (b) by providing opportunities to evaluate features of the game itself and to develop it for different target audiences; and (c) by forming part of participatory climate change communication activities, engaging lay people and/or experts in co‐creating knowledge.This article is categorized under:Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change

Climate Change Communication Research: A Systematic Review

This study is an examination of climate change communication research in which we examine topical, geographical and methodological trends. Using 160 peer-reviewed journal articles as evidence, we assess the field’s climate change research to-date and draw recommendations for future directions for research. Our findings illustrate that the majority of surveyed research focuses on public knowledge of and public belief in climate change, draws data from the Global North and tends toward quantitative methodological approaches, although a diversity of methodological approaches are represented. We recommend that future research correct ethnocentric tendencies by studying underrepresented regions such as the African continent, Latin America and the Caribbean, attend more to studies addressing adaptation to climate change impacts and embrace methodologies that address the localized nature of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Efficacy, Action, and Support for Reducing Climate Change Risks.

A growing body of research demonstrates that believing action to reduce the risks of climate change is both possible (self-efficacy) and effective (response efficacy) is essential to motivate and sustain risk mitigation efforts. Despite this potentially critical role of efficacy beliefs, measures and their use vary wildly in climate change risk perception and communication research, making it hard to compare and learn from efficacy studies. To address this problem and advance our understanding of efficacy beliefs, this article makes three contributions. First, we present a theoretically motivated approach to measuring climate change mitigation efficacy, in light of diverse proposed, perceived, and previously researched strategies. Second, we test this in two national survey samples (Amazon's Mechanical Turk N = 405, GfK Knowledge Panel N = 1,820), demonstrating largely coherent beliefs by level of action and discrimination between types of efficacy. Four additive efficacy scales emerge: personal self-efficacy, personal response efficacy, government and collective self-efficacy, and government and collective response efficacy. Third, we employ the resulting efficacy scales in mediation models to test how well efficacy beliefs predict climate change policy support, controlling for specific knowledge, risk perceptions, and ideology, and allowing for mediation by concern. Concern fully mediates the relatively strong effects of perceived risk on policy support, but only partly mediates efficacy beliefs. Stronger government and collective response efficacy beliefs and personal self-efficacy beliefs are both directly and indirectly associated with greater support for reducing the risks of climate change, even after controlling for ideology and causal beliefs about climate change.

Reflections on climate change communication research and practice in the second decade of the 21st century: what more is there to say?

Appreciable advances have been made in recent years in raising climate change awareness and enhancing support for climate and energy policies. There also has been considerable progress in understanding of how to effectively communicate climate change. This progress raises questions about the future directions of communication research and practice. What more is there to say? Through a selective literature review, focused on contributions since a similar stock‐taking exercise in 2010,1 the article delineates significant advances, emerging trends and topics, and tries to chart critical needs and opportunities going forward. It describes the climate communication landscape midway through the second decade of the 21st century to contextualize the challenges faced by climate change communication as a scientific field. Despite the important progress made on key scientific challenges laid out in 2010, persistent challenges remain (superficial public understanding of climate change, transitioning from awareness and concern to action, communicating in deeply politicized and polarized environments, and dealing with the growing sense of overwhelm and hopelessness). In addition, new challenges and topics have emerged that communication researchers and practitioners now face. The study reflects on the crucial need to improve the interaction between climate communication research and practice, and calls for dedicated science‐practice boundary work focused on climate change communication. A set of new charges to climate communicators and researchers are offered in hopes to move climate change communication to a new place—at once more humble yet also more ambitious than ever before, befitting to the crucial role it could play in the cultural work humanity faces with climate change. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:345–369. doi: 10.1002/wcc.403This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication

Interpersonal communication about climate change: how messages change when communicated through simulated online social networks

Climate change communication research has mainly focused on how to communicate climate change effectively to the public. By contrast, how such information is then spread through interpersonal social networks has been neglected, despite being an essential component of cultural change. Using a Facebook-like format, we examined what types of climate change messages ‘survive’ when passed between individuals via communication network chains. We found that statements centred on conventional climate change topics (e.g., its impact on the natural world and human health) survived longer in communication chains than those with less conventional topics (e.g., its impact on societal competence, development, or communality). Moreover, statements about gains from mitigation (gain-frames) survived more than those about costs of non-mitigation (loss-frames) in initial communications, but loss-framed information survived more later in communication chains. In light of research showing that climate change messages focused on society and/or gain frames can motivate action, this research highlights a challenge by showing that these messages are less likely to be spread throughout society.

What is the Difference between Cross-National Comparisons and Semi-Comparative Work? Example of Swedish-Ugandan Climate Change Communication Research

This methodological article presents the research approach of semi-comparisons and describes how it could be applied in the field of media and communication studies. The point of departure is that cross-national collaborations do not necessarily always have to result in full-fledged comparative studies, but can “go halfway”, i.e. stay at the semi-comparative level. This is exemplified in terms of an ongoing long-term collaboration between Swedish and Ugandan researchers, focusing on sustainable communication involving the role of media as a provider of relevant information in the case of the climate change issue. The semi-comparative approach – here characterized by: 1) cross-national research connectivity, 2) activities in which one “puts one’s own nation in a wider context” and 3) spontaneous, cross-national research influences – enables the generation of knowledge about the universalism and particularism within the dimensions of mediated climate communication, which would not have been possible with a regular cross-national comparative study. Keywords : climate change, media, cross-national comparative research, semi-comparative approach, sustainable communication, universalism, particularism.