Take Action Now: Motivational Framing and Action Requests in Climate Advocacy

This article explores similarities and differences between Internet-mediated climate change advocacy organizations and their legacy counterparts. It relies on a content analysis of advocacy emails produced by Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Greenpeace USA, League of Conservation Voters, Climate Reality Project, 1Sky, and 350.org. The study finds differences and similarities in strategic Internet use, including greater emphasis by climate groups on high threshold, offline actions; greater emphasis by legacy groups on low threshold, online actions; and high reliance by both framings that demand accountability from political elites. Implications for Internet-mediated and climate advocacy are discussed.     

Metaphors for the War (or Race) against Climate Change

Despite overwhelming scientific consensus, millions of Americans fail to view climate change as a pressing threat. How can we address this disconnect between science and public opinion? In the present study, we investigated the role of metaphorical framing in shaping attitudes toward climate change. Participants read a brief article that metaphorically described US efforts to reduce carbon emissions as a war or race against climate change, or non-metaphorically described it as the issue of climate change. We further manipulated whether these emission-reduction goals emphasized the relatively near or distant future. We found that, compared to the race frame, the war metaphor made people perceive more urgency and risk surrounding climate change and express a greater willingness to increase conservation behavior, irrespective of the time horizon. Those who read the non-metaphorical report tended to respond in between these two extremes. We discuss the implications of these findings for climate communications.     

Infiltrating citizen-driven initiatives for sustainability

To examine how citizen-driven initiatives for sustainability strive to bring about change and spread their practices, efforts to link social movement, grassroots innovation and green-consumption movements theory are built upon. Göteborg’s citizen-driven waste-prevention initiatives, such as food waste recovery, creating common reuse spaces in housing blocks, exchanging used toys and repairing abandoned bicycles, are considered with data from observations, workshops, documents, social media communications and in-depth interviews. Citizen-driven initiatives succeeded in mobilizing material resources, displaying and reframing various rationales, and creating collaborative local networks to develop their waste-prevention practices. These practices infiltrated the municipal administration, matching incipient institutional mandates to minimize waste. By so doing, they bring within mainstream institutions radical rationales that can become activated in the future, contributing to diachronic change.     

Fracking the Debate: Frame Shifts and Boundary Work in Dutch Decision Making on Shale Gas

The meaning of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas is contested worldwide: is it an energy game changer, a transition fuel, or a technology that poses severe environmental problems? In the Netherlands, a policy controversy developed in which fracturing was reframed from ‘business as usual’ to a potential environmental risk. This article theoretically and empirically describes this shift by arguing that the technology of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas is a boundary object that created a sphere of engagement for all sorts of actors. In this sphere, they negotiated a common but soft meaning of this technology. These negotiations consisted of frame contests. As part of those contests, the discursive strategies of framing and boundary work enabled opponents to create uncertainty about economic benefits and environmental impact. The shift in meaning transformed the issue from an economic one with standard governmental rules and regulations into a planning issue that needs more precaution.     

Routine Reporting of Environmental Risk: The First Traces of Micropollutants in the German Press

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the emergence of a new environmental issue in the German press. Since the 1990s, scientists have detected traces of pharmaceuticals, hormones and chemicals in all segments of the water cycle. These micropollutants have negative effects on aquatic life and might affect human health. Their sources are manifold and include private households. Yet although micropollutants of are direct concern to media audiences, they are a challenging topic for news reporting. Although this issue is systemic and fraught with uncertainty, it does not easily translate into news stories. Our content analysis of 444 articles (1995–2015) reveals that the societal risk was rarely presented as a stand-alone topic. Instead, the issue was mostly covered as part of local routine reporting and framed as a challenge for experts to solve. Over time, the reporting became more managerial, while media framings of micropollutants gained more substance and scope. We contend that local routine reporting should receive more attention as a public forum for addressing emerging environmental concerns.     

Eating Meat and Climate Change: The Media Blind Spot—A Study of Spanish and Italian Press Coverage

There is strong evidence that a meat and dairy-based diet is a very important contributor to climate change. However, the correlation between the production and consumption of livestock and anthropogenic climate change has received minimal media coverage. The literature for English-speaking countries shows a sort of media blind spot for meat in that the news media barely address, or do not address, the responsibility of individuals' dietary choices with regard to this issue. In this paper, we provide data for press coverage in Southern Europe from a sample of the top 10 Spanish and Italian newspapers for a seven-year period (2006–2013). Data from our samples correlate with findings from previous studies. However, our comparative study suggests that there are also meaningful differences between both countries studied while their alleged Mediterranean dietary background makes no difference in terms of ethical or dietary sensitivity.     

辽河流域工业废水主要污染物排放强度单元差异分析

污染物排放强度反映了单位新创造经济价值的环境负荷大小,运用均方差赋权法对辽宁省辽河流域6个控制单元2006年度废水量、COD和氨氮等3种主要污染物排放强度的区域差异进行了评价,结果表明,当年3种主要污染物排放强度综合评价的平均水平为0.4411,低于和高于平均水平的单元各有3个,其中浑河中游单元的评价值最低,只有平均水平的11.74%;辽河上游单元的污染物排放强度综合评价值最高,是平均水平的1.8倍,更是浑河中游的15.6倍。然后,以流域污染物排放强度最低值作为流域污染物排放强度目标值,计算各单元污染物排放强度减排潜力,结果表明,各控制单元主要污染物排放强度减排潜力具有显著的区域间差异。最后,应用＂污染贡献率＂这一指标,分析了辽河流域COD和氨氮排放的重污染行业以及单元分布,指出了各单元控制的重点。     

Developments in the Framing of Climate Change as a Public Health Issue in US Newspapers

News media are major channels for the transmission of information to the public and deliver news about the latest developments regarding health issues such as climate change. How the media frame such information may enhance public understanding and enable appropriate responses by individuals and communities. This study follows up on previous research examining media portrayals of climate change in US newspapers from 1 January 2007 to 31 December 2008. Here, we content analyze 270 news stories on climate change as a public health issue from five US newspapers between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2012. Findings indicate that the total number of articles about climate change declined while emphasis on the public health dimension of climate change increased. The types of generic news frames (i.e., dramatic/substantive) most frequently used did not considerably change across the two time periods, however. To explain this, we discuss ways in which people may assess and spark change in news framing of public issues to better reach and influence a range of audiences.     

Framing Renewable Energy: A Comparative Study of Newspapers in Australia and Sweden

Australia and Sweden display very different institutional settings and contexts for the production of environmental journalism. This empirical study examined how two major quality newspapers in Sweden and Australia have framed renewable energy as an environmental, political, scientific, economic and civil society issue. A deductive, quantitative methodological approach was used to identify dominant frames and actors in articles in The Australian (Australia) and Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) between October 2010 and June 2011 2010/2011. The findings suggest that the attention given to different types of renewable energy in the two newspapers and how issues were framed was contingent on the domestication of the discussion of renewable energy in the two countries. Reporting on renewable energy in both newspapers was characterized by a focus on “elite” actors and economic frames, the absence of civil society frames and negative (The Australian) or ambiguous (Dagens Nyheter) environmental frames. The study extends our understanding of the contextual conditions that enable and limit journalists when reporting environmental issues.     

The case for policy‐relevant conservation science

Drawing on the “evidence‐based” (Sutherland et al. 2013) versus “evidence‐informed” debate (Adams & Sandbrook 2013), which has become prominent in conservation science, I argue that science can be influential if it holds a dual reference (Lentsch & Weingart 2011) that contributes to the needs of policy makers whilst maintaining technical rigor. In line with such a strategy, conservation scientists are increasingly recognizing the usefulness of constructing narratives through which to enhance the influence of their evidence (Leslie et al. 2013; Lawton & Rudd 2014). Yet telling stories alone is rarely enough to influence policy; instead, these narratives must be policy relevant. To ensure that evidence is persuasive alongside other factors in a complex policy‐making process, conservation scientists could follow 2 steps: reframe within salient political contexts and engage more productively in boundary work, which is defined as the ways in which scientists “construct, negotiate, and defend the boundary between science and policy” (Owens et al. 2006:640). These will both improve the chances of evidence‐informed conservation policy.