How Solutions Journalism Shapes Support for Collective Climate Change Adaptation

ABSTRACT

News media are the public’s primary source about risks such as climate change, but traditional journalistic approaches to climate change have failed to build support for collective social responses. Solutions journalism, an emerging practice focused on credible stories about responses to societal problems, may offer an alternate approach. From an online experiment with a convenience sample of U.S. undergraduates (N = 348), we found that solutions journalism stories were positively associated with perceived behavioral control, which mediated support for collective action for climate change adaptation. Additionally, attribution of responsibility to individuals and government, participant hope, and eco-anxiety were associated with support for collective action. Findings extend our understanding of how risk communication affects policy support for climate change adaptation and suggest that solutions journalism may allow journalists to communicate climate change’s danger without depressing support for social action to mitigate its effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Framing
• climate change
• media effects
• risk communication
• solutions journalism

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Brooke Fisher Liu for her feedback on initial drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Kathryn Thier, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Constructive and solutions “act as an antidote to the negativity bias in traditional news, and both encourage contextual, thematic reporting with an aim to increase trust and empower audiences,” yet they are “separate approaches” (Lough & McIntyre, 2021, p. 2). Constructive journalism may, but not necessarily, employ solutions-oriented journalism (McIntyre & Gyldensted, 2018; Thier, 2021), whereas solutions journalism refers to news stories that meet SJN’s definition of credible responses to social problems with four essential qualities. Thus, it is “much narrower” (BBC World Service, 2016, n.p.).