Mapping the Field of Climate Change Communication 1993–2018: Geographically Biased, Theoretically Narrow, and Methodologically Limited

ABSTRACT

Climate change communication spans multiple disciplines which in many cases have insufficient understanding of each other’s research traditions and, therefore, there has not been a solid interdisciplinary debate. This makes it hard not only to survey the field at large but also to pinpoint further studies which are needed to bridge these knowledge divides. The aim of this systematic literature review is to shed a broader light on the field of environmental and climate change communication and to make possible research gaps more apparent. Through an extensive quantitative content analysis of journal articles (N = 407), this study provides an understanding of the methodological, theoretical, and geographical approaches within the field. The findings show that a typical study within the field is a quantitative content analysis of traditional news media in the West. We have also uncovered some important insufficiencies of the search engines commonly used when carrying out literature reviews.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• environmental communication
• literature review
• search engines

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The categories were environmental sciences, multidisciplinary sciences, environmental studies, communication studies, and interdisciplinary social sciences.

2 https://academic.oup.com/isle/pages/About.

3 Our initial ambition was to have theoretical outlook as a nominal scale, but it was impossible to achieve good values on the Krippendorff’s alpha.

4 Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort by President John F. Kennedy, September 12^th, 1962.

5 Ecology and Society, Energy Policy, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Science Communication, Landscape and Urban Planning, Nature Climate Change, New Media and Society, Regional Environmental Change, Science Communication.