Representations of Pacific Islands and climate change in US, UK, and Australian newspaper reporting

Meghan M. Shea (), James Painter and Shannon Osaka
Additional contact information
Meghan M. Shea: University of Oxford
James Painter: University of Oxford
Shannon Osaka: University of Oxford

Climatic Change, 2020, vol. 161, issue 1, No 6, 89-108

Abstract: Abstract Pacific Islands often exemplify climate change vulnerability, yet little scholarship has probed how these representations translate to the media. This study examines newspaper articles about Pacific Islands and climate change in American, British, and Australian newspapers from 1999 to 2018, analyzing volume, content, and dominant narratives. These quantitative results are complemented by semi-structured interviews with journalists as well as Pacific stakeholders who engage with the media. Reporting on Pacific Islands and climate change focuses heavily on who and what are at risk from climate impacts; reporting on solutions is less frequent and dominated by discussions of migration. This overemphasis on vulnerability potentially downplays the importance of the resiliency and action of Pacific Island communities and positions the Pacific as a site for climate catastrophe, rather than climate justice. However, recent reporting may be moving away from overarching narratives of vulnerability, motivating continued research into these depictions and how they promote or discourage climate action.

Keywords: Pacific Islands; Climate change; Media communication about climate change; Vulnerability; Discourse analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-020-02674-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:161:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s10584-020-02674-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-020-02674-w

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().