https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7760-0416
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ABSTRACT
Modeling future pathways is essential for climate research, and such climate futures are also an integral part of media coverage on climate change. However, research on media’s framing of climate change has only sparsely investigated future visions, although media effect studies assume that characteristics of climate futures, including their visual representation, can motivate people to act. Hence, in this study, we analyzed the multimodal media framing of climate futures. The qualitative content analysis considered leading news magazine cover stories on climate change (N = 62) from 1980 to 2019 in India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We identified three multimodal frames: While Global Doom and Local Tragedies were dominant in the early years, a new frame has recently emerged and focuses more prominently on a Sustainable Future. This analysis thus witnessed a shift from apocalyptic climate futures to a more diverse and potentially empowering reporting.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Deepak Tiwari for his assistance in obtaining issues of India Today. We would also like to thank Wiebke Meeder for access to Spiegel stories. Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge that our coding frame is based on a framework on social constructions of climate futures, which the authors developed together with their colleagues at Universität Hamburg and the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, namely Simone Rödder, Michael Schnegg, Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw, Miriam Prys-Hansen, Youssef Ibrahim, Christopher Pavenstädt, Coral O'Brian, Inga Janina Sievert, and Jana Lüdemann.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author [LG], upon reasonable request.
Notes
1 Climate models are quantitative simulations of interactions of the drivers of climate, including atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and ice (IPCC Citation2013). They are used to study projections of future climate.
2 The number represents climate forcing (i.e., factors that affect the climate and drive its change) from atmospheric greenhouse gases in Watts per square meter.
3 According to Hellsten, Porter, and Nerlich (Citation2014), climate change only rose to international prominence in 1992 (Rio Earth Summit). However, the IPCC was established in 1988; hence, we decided to include the 1980s in our sample.
4 There was only one example in the sample; a picture showing a beach club on a sunny evening, predicting that with Mediterranean temperatures, Germans will enjoy their summer evenings (SP10).
5 India Today was, however, not alone in using a war metaphor to describe climate change, e.g., the well-known cover of TM13 replacing the US flag with a tree hissed by American soldiers has the headline “How to win the war on global warming”.
6 We only found five examples: SP15 showing a boy in Africa holding on to its meal, the caption predicting: “millions of people will be at risk of starvation”; a picture of Tuvalu in TM18 forecasting island sinking; and three scientific graphs (SP18, SP20, and TM16).
7 For instance, IT3, the one showing the Gateway to India, also linked on that cover page to “what we can do to save India”. This was, however, not addressed in the main article.