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

James Painter (), Suzie Marshall and Katherine Leitzell
Additional contact information
James Painter: University of Oxford
Suzie Marshall: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group I TSU
Katherine Leitzell: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group I TSU

Climatic Change, 2024, vol. 177, issue 6, No 1, 23 pages

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Climate change; IPCC; News media; Scenarios; Communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-024-03744-z 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:177:y:2024:i:6:d:10.1007_s10584-024-03744-z

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

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-024-03744-z

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 ().