Environmental Debates in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Media, Communication, and the Public

The world has faced a series of pandemics in its history, and the COVID-19 pandemic is a monumental one, bringing about far-reaching impacts on all aspects of life, including impacts on public health, and on the way people live. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the interdependence between human beings and the environment, evident from the impact that COVID-19 has had on the environment because of the limits it put to human mobility and travel. The world has witnessed how countries experienced positive environmental impacts on their local areas through improvements in air quality, water quality and noise pollution. This was driven particularly by national lockdown(s), where social interactions and movements were limited due to work-from-home arrangements, people were encouraged to stay at home, and non-essential domestic and international travel were being halted.

In the first half of 2020, drastic reduction in air pollution was reported during the different lockdown periods in the 50 capital cities that experienced the most air pollution (Rodriguez-Urrego & Rodriguez-Urrego, 2020). Improvements in water quality were detected worldwide due to reduced maritime activity and less dumping of waste (Manoiu et al., 2022). The lockdowns also brought about reduced noise levels due to minimized human and vehicular traffic, thereby resulting in lower levels of noise pollution and better quality of life (Caniato et al., 2021). The immediate impact of COVID-19 on the environment is evident through the large reduction in carbon dioxide emissions worldwide that occurred during the onset of the pandemic, or the first half of 2020, particularly during the initial lockdown, as compared to the same timeframe in 2019 (Liu et al., 2020).

While the immediate positive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the environment is noticeable, these short-term impacts may not translate into long-term ones as nations have reopened. This means that regular activities have resumed and greater emphasis is being placed on the recovery of the economy. As the world reverts to its ways of exploiting the natural environment to achieve economic growth, not only will the existing positive impact on the environment be undone, but there will also be a greater risk of more unknown viruses emerging. This can be a result of wildlife having to adapt to the damage caused by human beings, which could facilitate the spread of diseases (Johnson et al., 2020), and intense animal farming continues to pose a great risk for new zoonotic viruses to appear (Hayek, 2022). Furthermore, in view of conversations surrounding the short-term positive environmental impact of COVID-19, long-standing environmental issues may end up being framed to appear less of a concern. For example, the immediate positive environmental impact of lower carbon emissions was highlighted in reports about pollution levels during COVID-19. As a result, the public might no longer view environmental concerns, such as pollution, as pressing issues that need to be addressed in the long run (Rousseau & Deschacht, 2020). In addition, the public might not be very aware of the environmental benefits the pandemic had since there was not a lot of media coverage on this topic (Bhatti et al., 2022).

Despite this, people have been more conscious and acquainted with the natural environment around them (Rousseau & Deschacht, 2020). Hence, it is imperative to communicate the need for environmental protection and conservation while the economy recovers. As the world learns to live with COVID-19, we need to work towards building adaptive capacity through research, to understand the ways in which each nation can respond to the long-term effects of COVID-19 and other health crises, without harming the environment. Research should investigate the positive effects of the pandemic on the natural environment and suggest how these effects can be translated to when the world runs under business-as-usual conditions.

Adaptive capacity is defined as a society’s capability to work around climate change, to manage its challenges and leverage on the opportunities it brings (Parry et al., 2007). In the context of environmental communication, building adaptive capacity can facilitate a better understanding of the public's perception of pandemic and environmental risks, and the actual risks, ensuring congruence between public understanding, scientific knowledge, and government messaging. With learning capacity being one of the dimensions of adaptive capacity (Gupta et al., 2010), it is important for policymakers, scientists, media, and environmental communicators to be aware of the public's understanding of pandemic and environmental risks, and to communicate in a way that the public receives and understands the information as intended. As such, adaptive capacity allows policymakers and communication practitioners to be better equipped at formulating government communication strategies and policies in managing pandemics and environmental crises.

Given the unprecedented and pressing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, it comes as no surprise that it quickly took center stage in the media (Bhatti et al., 2022). Since there are constraints on how many topics the media can focus on, other topics took a backseat. This includes environmental topics, such as climate change. Internationally, this has been observed from Finland, where climate change coverage in newspapers fell (Lyytimäki et al., 2020), to Switzerland, where the topic of climate change went from being a “routine issue” with a large amount of media coverage to a “struggling issue” with less coverage (Rauchfleisch et al., 2021). In the Canadian context, one study found that climate change media coverage fell at the start of COVID-19, to a level as low as what was recorded in 2017 and 2018 (Stoddart et al., 2021). This period falls in between two major events that marked the peak of media coverage on climate change. The two events were the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference where the Paris Agreement, a treaty to manage climate change, was adopted, and the dawn of Fridays for Future (FFF), a global movement led by the youth to spark action regarding climate change, which stemmed from Greta Thunberg's strike at the Swedish parliament in August 2018.

However, fewer media coverage on environmental issues does not mean that they are less important compared to the COVID-19 pandemic. One study of leading newspaper coverage in six countries (Germany, Argentina, South Africa, South Korea, the US, and Pakistan) showed that during the first months of the pandemic, framing of the pandemic was very rarely environmental (Bhatti et al., 2022). Despite this, there is reason to conclude that instead, the pandemic brought about a shift in the conversation surrounding environmental communication. Media framing of environmental issues has now pivoted to focus more on COVID-19 as an opportunity to manage climate change. While COVID-19 and the environment are separate crises, they are interconnected and can be managed through solutions addressing both crises. An essay on the Australian media coverage discusses environmental communications to have drawn parallels between COVID-19 and environmental crises to keep the discourse about the environment going (Mocatta & Hawley, 2020), with COVID-19 used as a framing device for environmental protests (Augé, 2021). One such example is the revival of the metaphor of “ecosystem health,” such as “environment as a body” or “pollution as a disease,” used in environmental communications when metaphorical references to COVID-19 are made (Augé, 2021).

In environmental discourse, the public tends to view COVID-19 and environmental issues as parallels, comparing the virus with climate change (VanDyke et al., 2022). Discussions surrounding wildlife-related issues have also been in the spotlight because of the pandemic, with calls to manage and conserve wildlife. In China, such issues, including the prohibited trade and consumption of wildlife, were brought up following the COVID-19 outbreak. This is due to the nature of COVID-19 transmission, with the initial uncertainty about animal-to-human transmission of the virus (Wang et al., 2021). Separately, leading organizations are also stepping up to manage the environmental crises in tandem with COVID-19 internationally. For example, The World Bank’s Climate Support Facility’s Green Recovery Initiative seeks to drive economic improvements following COVID-19 while integrating climate change efforts, aligned with the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (The World Bank, 2023).

Besides changes in the way people view environmental issues alongside COVID-19, the platforms where such issues are communicated have shifted too. Because of restrictions on social activities and movements, environmental groups, and activists could not hold physical events and protests with the same fervor they did before. Instead, they adapted to focus more of their efforts online. One example would be the youth climate change activist group Fridays for Future (FFF) adapting their outreach efforts for change. Prior to the pandemic, FFF adopted a hybrid offline and online approach in their communications. Their main forms of advocacy involved physical protests and activities, using social media to promote their offline activities and share information. With the pandemic, FFF strengthened its online presence beyond informative and promotional material to messaging that portrays activism (Sorce & Dumitrica, 2021).

Presenting the special issue: intersection between environmental and public health discourse

The current special issue casts a spotlight on the intersection between environmental and public health discourse, communication, and the public during the uncertain times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only do the contributions broaden our perspectives by investigating the issue of environmental debates in times of the COVID-19 pandemic from a global perspective, but they also offer deeper insights into public discourses in specific countries such as Canada, China, and Switzerland, using a variety of methodological designs and analyses.

The study by Stoddart et al. (2021) investigates how the climate change coverage of six Canadian agenda-setting legacy news media changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The quantitative coverage volume analysis shows that the emergence of the novel coronavirus drew some of the media attention away from climate change. However, as the analysis from 2015 to 2020 shows, media attention towards climate change did fluctuate over time, and often peaked during events such as COP (Conference of the Parties) meetings. Public perception research from Norway grounded in the hypothesis of the “finite pool of worry” shows that worry about climate change significantly decreased during the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic (Gregersen et al., 2022). Declining media coverage of and worry about climate change during the new and uncertain times of a pandemic makes sense. Furthermore, the qualitative framing analysis by Stoddart et al. (2021) showed that when COVID-19 and climate change were covered together, COVID-19 was framed as an opportunity for green recovery. Coverage also suggested that the two crises should be considered parallel. It would have been interesting to see if and how media framing of climate change, in general, changed during the pandemic, which was beyond the scope of this study. Lastly, the analysis showed that right-leaning news outlets gave more room for skeptical news frames than the other sources.

Social media provide a dynamic space where diverse and often opposing ideas compete, generating a continuous flow of discourse that can shift and reshape our understanding of complex issues, such as the human-nature relationship. Fine and Love-Nichols (2021) examined a hashtag, #WeAreTheVirus, on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic, and found that three responses emerged – ecofacism labeling, counterslogans, and parody. Their findings underscore the dynamic nature of social media and its potential to facilitate rich and multifaceted discussions about essential topics.

The study by Sorce and Dumitrica (2021) examined social media engagement strategies used by Fridays for Future (FFF) in 27 European countries during the early days of the pandemic. The qualitative study analyzes Facebook posts using a framing lens embedded in social movement theory. The analysis highlights three framing strategies used across the countries studied. The first is adaptation, which refers to efforts by FFF to shift their protest activities online while communicating that the group is complying with governmental mandates. Within this frame, posts about solidarity were common. Soon after, FFF reframed their online communication to reclaim the crisis under a climate narrative. The authors argue that activists highjacked pandemic terminology to reposition climate change as the most important crisis. This reframing also connected environmental problems and the emergence and spread of the virus. Finally, FFF framing incorporated a call for action despite the pandemic. Followers were asked to use digital tools to keep fighting for climate justice. The study also highlights that activists used mobilization during the pandemic as evidence that urgently needed climate action should also be possible.

The study by VanDyke et al. (2022) introduces a computational content analysis method to examine social (risk) amplification in online communities. Specifically, the online discussion about COVID-19 within environment-focused communities was investigated. The findings revealed that COVID-19 risks and related consequences were amplified through online users’ discussions. Thus, the online discussion seems an important amplification station. Second, users often discussed COVID-19 drawing parallels to environmental risks and issues, such as linking the virus to climate change, reflecting environmental injustice. In addition, the evolutionary feature of online discussion appeared in four time points. The dynamic change of topical patterns across five periods provided a more nuanced depiction of how users experienced and amplified health-environmental risk over time. This insight highlighted the ripple effects that individuals’ risk perception was not influenced by initial risk but amplified risk in the later evolution. This research highlighted the domain of “health-environmental risk issues,” which is worthy of further scholarly attention as these two areas might overlap and their theoretical base and practical implications can be shared interdependently.

The study by Wang et al. (2021) examines the relationship between the news agenda and public agenda concerning wildlife-related issues on social media after the initial COVID-19 outbreak in China. Such issues became widely discussed because of the nature of COVID-19 transmission being mainly from animals to humans. Employing big data analytics and time series analysis, they assess news reports and public discussions on Weibo between January 1 and April 8, 2020. This study explores the less studied area of agenda setting between news outlets and the public to uncover if the news media influences the (digital) public or vice versa. They found that the relationship between news agenda and public agenda on social media is one where they mutually affect each other, particularly regarding agenda attributes.

Rauchfleisch et al. (2021) investigate whether media coverage about COVID-19 displaced media attention to the issue of climate change in Switzerland. Using secondary databases, web scraping, and social media tracker, the authors yielded 1,060,820 news articles and 92.7 million tweets in the context of Switzerland as their units of analysis. With a Bayesian structural time-series model on media content from April 2019 to the end of January 2020, they found that the COVID-19 crisis negatively affected media attention to climate change in both traditional Swiss news media and social media. The model estimated a reduction of 16,523 news articles and 146,446 tweets on climate change due to media attention on COVID-19 during the period of analysis. Furthermore, using hashtag co-occurrence analysis, the authors explored how tweets about COVID-19 and climate change were linked to each other over time. They found that with the development of the COVID-19 crisis, some climate activists attempted to relate climate change to COVID-19 in their tweets.

Analyzing the early pandemic discourse of the globally influential advocacy organization Extinction Rebellion (XR), Augé (2021) highlights how metaphors allowed activists to integrate COVID-19 into their online environmental discourse. XR altered prevalent expressions of the ECOSYSTEM HEALTH metaphor and in turn, generated new climate change arguments. At a time in which public attention to climate change decreased and interest in human health increased, this metaphor offered a fitting strategy of personifying nature through health. Augé presents two overarching insights. First, XR continued its pre-pandemic practice of appealing to health metaphors not specific to any disease, while emphasizing links between HUMAN BODY and PLANET BODY. XR expanded beyond its prior planetary health focus to the idea of taking care of the planet as one takes care of oneself. Second, XR's COVID-specific metaphorical discourse similarly amplified HUMAN HEALTH, stressing that healthy people need a healthy environment. XR underscored that COVID-19 is not the only threat to humanity and that, as with the pandemic, there are actions to take at home to address climate change. While prioritizing climate change, XR reframed pre-pandemic metaphorical appeals to DISEASE and AGGRESSION (or ATTACK) in ways that highlighted parallel features of COVID-19 and climate change. Across all examined discourse, the organization leveraged the popular sentiment that human health could no longer be taken for granted. Overall, XR's pre-pandemic RESCUING THE PLANET metaphor of ECOSYSTEM HEALTH shifted to RESCUING HUMANITY. Augé's explication of this shift enriches our understanding of how activists evolve metaphors, albeit in ways that maintain or increase environmental issue salience within the specific historical moment.

Investigating eco-tourist media rather than mediated activism, Tate’s (2022) article contributes to the understudied area of environmental communication in the form of interspecies interaction between humans and aquatic nonhumans. During the early pandemic of widespread lockdown measures, social isolation's mental health risks became a topic of concern. People worldwide sought nature experiences as well as interaction with nonhuman species (e.g. pet adoption) at a higher rate than in the years leading up to the pandemic (Ho et al., 2021). As Tate shows, intertwined with an anthropocentric interest in how animals may satisfy human needs such as those acutely experienced during the pandemic is a tendency to anthropomorphically construct nonhuman animals as experiencing these same needs. Tate's qualitative analysis of online “humanature” discourses and the communicative practice of Facetiming eels considers how a Tokyo aquarium extended the use of technology for social distancing to interspecies engagement. The aquarium's video call initiative centered the questionable claim that “remembering humans” is a vital health need among garden eels. Indeed, the aquarium created an unexpected, welcomed, and stimulating opportunity for public engagement with nature and science. Yet this invitation to virtual tourists to help take care of eels known in Japan for their cute appearance reaffirmed a romantic tourist gaze and its nature-culture divide. Tate's article raises important ethical questions about who benefits from such instances of marine tourism and whether they are as dialogical, intimate, vital, and “natural” as suggested.

Trajectories for future research

This special issue explores how human's conception of and relationship with the environment might have changed due to, or during the COVID-19 pandemic. The eight articles in this special issue enhance our understanding of the environmental discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic and direct us to new research trajectories that can make valuable contributions to communication theories and practice.

Media coverage and framing of specific issues do not exist in a vacuum uninfluenced by other events. As Stoddart et al.'s study (2021) shows, the COVID-19 pandemic had some influence on the volume and framing of climate change. If media framing influences public perception to any degree, or sets the agenda for how individuals, politicians, corporations, and others talk about these issues, then observing media framing changes can help understand and predict “windows of opportunity.” Future research should detect changes in media framing and try to attribute them to other societal events, whether health crises, energy crises, wars, extreme weather events, or new scientific discoveries, or otherwise, and track if those framing changes alter perceptions in the long run. It would be especially valuable to know when media framing shifts away from being descriptive of an issue, or giving room to misinformation, to giving more room for calls for action, solution journalism and more goal-oriented coverage in a more substantial way. Knowing this could help identify moments when the public might be more receptive to calls for behavioral change, supportive of climate change mitigation policies and other non-political mitigation strategies.

Similarly, Tate’s (2022) article on environmental communication's forms and functions in relation to COVID-19 era social isolation highlights an important direction for research. Environmental communication studies have only begun examining the forms and functions of emerging technologies such as those of social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. It is difficult to understate the significance of research on how emerging technologies empower and inhibit communication for environmental sustainability and justice, as well as human health. As one possible trajectory for new inquiry, scholars might examine technologically mediated humanature communication focused on children, people in their later life stages, and groups with different cognitive, emotional, and bodily abilities. Given that these groups often have underserved but crucial needs in the areas such as mental health, environmental education, quality of life, and accessibility, such work may bare particularly important implications for theory and practice.

Illuminating another direction for research, Augé’s (2021) study attests to the need for scholarship on possibilities that environmental metaphors manifest for serving numerous functions: translating scientific issues, fostering emotional appeal, making connections across political issues, widening audiences, and forging complex everyday sensibilities about interconnected global problems. As different parts of the world move through their own stages of the pandemic and our climate emergency, further inquiry might explore stability and change in various metaphors in environmental communication. If such metaphors are grounded in common knowledge, and the pandemic has transformed this knowledge, how has this transformation continued, stalled, or been implemented? In Augé's study, new metaphor-based arguments emerged as of Extinction Rebellion adapted to lockdown, masking, and social distancing restrictions that precluded its usual forms of activism. As such measures dissipate, others are taken, and new global health events precipitate societal responses, further analyzing how environmental communicators adapt metaphor-based sense-making frames promise to build on existing knowledge.

On the methodological front, current environmental communication studies have widely applied big data analytics to unpack online public opinion toward environmental issues (Boyer et al., 2021; Thorson & Wang, 2020; Vu et al., 2020). This is similarly reflected in Wang et al.'s (2021) piece in this special issue. However, these studies have mainly prioritized computer-assisted content analysis, such as text mining, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis, to examine discussions among online users. Being assisted by more computational methods, future environmental communication research should strive to demystify other facets and provide a deeper understating of emotions (Nabi et al., 2018), user interaction networks (Williams et al., 2015), visual cues (Duan et al., 2022), among others. It is high time for social scientists to respond to this shift that data on environmental discussion has drastically increased as online activities become more frequent in the post-pandemic era. An all-encompassing framework for computational environmental research and new knowledge through analysis of online traces and user-generated content is needed.

Another key research trajectory is for future studies to conduct cross-cultural studies to investigate environmental discourses and their impact on people's attitudes and behaviors in the post-pandemic era. As public perceptions and behaviors are dependent on media systems (e.g. authoritarian vs. democratic media system) and cultural values (e.g. collectivism vs. individualism) (Bhatti et al., 2022; Geber & Ho, 2022), environmental discourses may therefore vary across countries and cultures (Bhatti et al., 2022). Most articles in this special issue are based on data from a single country, which does not allow meaningful comparisons across countries. Conducting cross-cultural research can therefore allow us to compare public and media discourse toward environmental issues across different nations post-pandemic.

As the societal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely long lasting, shaping the adaptive capacity of a society becomes paramount. Society needs to respond to environmental challenges, including those of climate change, and leverage the opportunities it brings. Moving into the post-pandemic era, and before the next pandemic with the probability of much higher death rates (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023; The Economist, 2023; Kupferschmidt, 2023; Tufekci, 2023; WHO, 2023), more research is needed to longitudinally examine the shift in online and offline environmental messaging and discourses. Most studies in this special issue analyzed (social) media texts. The limitations imposed by the pandemic may explain the similarity of the research methods used. However, due to the lack of research on people's attitudes and behaviors, it is difficult to determine the impact of these media contents. As some authors suggested (e.g. Fine & Love-Nicholas, 2021), it may be fruitful for future researchers to examine the impact of various online discourses using experimental designs. Assessing the cumulative effects of environmental messages and activities on people's attitudes and behaviors can help in developing adaptive capacity in the context of environmental communication.

Another research path is the public portrayal of political systems’ capacities to deal with crises. Several studies showed that the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change were reported as parallel crises (e.g. Stoddart et al., 2021). This raises the question as to whether the pandemic emergency and the corresponding extension of governments’ ruling power in many democracies is regarded as a blueprint for the crisis of climate change. While this may seem conducive in terms of efficiency for society's climate action, it might be also detrimental to critical public deliberation on the best solutions which, in turn, can be tedious and hamper efficiency. Thus, the area of tension between efficient societal action and a diverse deliberate discourse should be investigated further, such as in their effects on citizens’ self-efficacy, their readiness to participate in politics, their acceptance of climate action, and others.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Vanessa S. Ho for her assistance rendered to this editorial piece.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme (Project No. NRF2020-ITC003-0001).