by Neerej Dev 11 May 2022
The Undisputed Role of Media
Media makes strategic choices about which considerations to emphasize and which to downplay on any given issue. Their choices result in the proliferation of frames in socio-political discourses. This is even more true when dealing with a complex subject such as climate change as it spans across multiple complex domains, including science, economics, value judgments and impacts within and across nations, and future projections about uncertain consequences. The media therefore plays a significant role in the construction of social reality, and thus, making sense of social attitudes toward significant issues such as climate change requires an understanding of what is reported in the media.
According to Norton Nelkin, although the primary role of media is to inform and not to change attitudes, the selection and reporting of information or journalistic interpretation has an undeniable impact on shaping perceptions, particularly on subjects with which people have little or no direct contact. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the media was explicitly urged to become involved in creating awareness for the preservation of the environment.
The United Nations Development Report (2006) attributes the quadrupled coverage of climate news in UK from 2003 to 2006 to the release of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore and ‘The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change’, report by Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. However, Professor Bernardo Díaz Nosty argues that the 2008 economic crisis has driven down the news value of climate change, at a time when irreversible climate change is already at play; the implementation of global policies for mitigating environmental degradation is indispensable.
Media messages from time to time have emphasized on the “catastrophic impacts” and drawn parallels with an alarmist, steeped in the language of fear and disastrous overtone. Anabela Carvalho and Jacquelin Burgess, identified an increasing trend through their study that since 2000, journalists have made a numerous number of connections between extreme weather events (such as floods and heat waves) and global climate change. This often leads to distorting scientific complexities and uncertainties into a chain of events leading to disaster and necessitating immediate action. The careful and measured language of science is often unsuitable for the sound-bite sensationalism that characterizes the majority of contemporary news media. However, some media organizations like ‘The Guardian’, have started to talk about ‘climate emergency’ rather than climate change, taking a clearer stand.
Climate Change and Indian Media
India has always regarded scientific climate knowledge as political, often aligning it with other legitimate discourses to impart meaning to the physical phenomenon of climate change. The Indian state has granted legitimacy to climate science as a discourse in the development of climate policy, but only when it does so from a nationalist perspective. The Indian government constructs temporal imaginaries of climate change through the downscaling of global and continental representations of the phenomenon to national and subnational ones.
Simon Billett from the Oxford University’s Center for the Environment, raises the argument that climate change is largely portrayed in India as an environmental process rather than as a scientific output. Most articles directly attribute their certainty about climate change to ongoing, observable environmental issues, debating that climate change is ‘underway’ in India. By emphasizing the environmental rather than scientific aspects of climate change, the press concentrate their coverage on the impacts and risks associated with global warming. This secondary discourse is built on the press’s primary acceptance of anthropogenic climate change to assert India’s vulnerability to climate change. Along with using environmental change as evidence for climate change, the press establishes a distinct narrative of threat.
We can trace distinctive phases in India’s ambivalent relationship with climate science over time. The first is where the state has shifted from suspicion to acceptance of it as a legitimate source of knowledge upon which to base discourse and policy. The development and subsequent use of regional climate models (RCMs) has resulted in a discursive downscaling of climate change from a global problem of imagining possible futures to a national one. Alternatively, the doomsday scenario painted by scientists has prompted the State’s political imaginary on climate change to shift from the past to the future. The wide spectrum of literature produced by the country’s universities and research networks on climate science leads to spatial re-scaling of climate futures from a long term to a short term one.
Michael Bruggemann who is a Professor of Climate and Science Communication at the University of Hamburg, generalizes the transition in coverage of climate stories into three representational frames. Firstly, several cover stories from the 1980s and 1990s depict a vision of the future that could be summed up as “global doom” – and do so through the use of extreme scenarios for our planet. These stories employ frightening and apocalyptic language and imagery. The second frame, “local tragedies,” is similar but more focused on a specific region, making it more concrete. It focuses on the regional impacts of climate change. Covers and articles feature images of temperature rise, reduced rainfall, storms, wildfires and other associated calamities. The third frame is more concerned with “sustainable solutions”: many of these articles accept global warming of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius as a fact and discuss strategies for limiting warming to those levels. Many of the cover images here have a global theme and feature individuals such as Greta Thunberg or address local issues, but do so through the use of symbolic images, such as a picture of a tree inside a lightbulb to represent innovative ideas. These frames over time have evolved into a more diverse collection that complements one another.
James Painter and Teresa Ashe traced the presence of climate skepticism in the print media in six countries from 2007–10 and concluded that Indian media not only report on scientific research on the negative effects of climate change, but also on scientific advancements that help us better understand the phenomenon and ways to mitigate and adapt. Scientists and scientific organizations are frequently cited in such stories, which present climate change as real, caused by humans, and already having negative consequences in India and elsewhere, reiterating previous findings. Climate change stories still remain consistently low in comparison to other topics. Environmental Sociologist, Andreas Schmidt argues that Indian media frame climate change along divided lines of developed versus developing countries in a “largely hackneyed and arguably unproductive discourse along a risk responsibility divide”.
Science as Power in Environmental Negotiations
Even though the media plays a vital role in shaping public opinion, many individuals do not feel personally or immediately touched by extreme weather catastrophes such as hurricanes, floods, and fires. Politicians, scientists, and policymakers are increasingly employing the concept and vocabulary of risk to define what is likely the century’s largest problem, human-induced climate change. Given that much of the argument over climate change is about the future, it unavoidably entails some degree of uncertainty regarding the timing, pace, and severity of potential impacts, as well as the alternatives for managing and preventing them. However, uncertainty can obstruct decision-making. Furthermore, scientific ambiguity is sometimes perceived, particularly by the general public, as ignorance.
Many individuals are unaware of the contrast between ‘school science,’ which provides solid facts and trustworthy comprehension, and ‘research science,’ which is characterized by uncertainty, and frequently serves as a motivation for future exploration. One argument for using the language of risk is that it shifts public debate away from the notion that decisions should be delayed until conclusive proof or absolute certainty is obtained and toward timely action informed by an analysis of the comparative costs and risks associated with various choices and options (including doing nothing). While many argue that risk is not a panacea when compared to the messages of disaster or uncertainty that frequently accompany climate change, it does provide a more sophisticated and appropriate language for discussion and a more useful prism through which to analyse the challenge. Most often scientific models relating to the consequences of sea-level rise or migration can be difficult to convey and multilateral conferences can have the feel of remote meeting rooms. A further difficulty for the media has been to make climate change coverage appealing to diverse audiences, including the young, the political, and people who are now indifferent to the issue.
In many countries, specialist journalism is declining, in part due to problems with the print media’s business model. It’s concerning that the majority of journalists now cover highly specialized risk areas in finance, health, and the environment as generalists. It is critical to encourage and assist journalists in bridging the divide. Journalists, in particular, will need to improve their ability to deal with risk, numbers, and probabilities in order to contribute to a more constructive narrative about climate change than doom and gloom or uncertainty.