The Climate Emergency in the Spanish Media and the «Decalogue of Recommendations for Reporting on Climate Change»

Abstract

In the last two years, since the publication of the latest IPCC reports (IPCC, 2018 & 2020), greater alarm in the scientific, media and social areas has elevated the climate crisis to an emergency level. The social perception of the risk for people and the communication of this emergency has become a complex social phenomenon being constantly updated. This article sets out the results of the content analysis for communications on climate change (CC) in the main Spanish press, radio and television media and their respective Twitter accounts. A structural sampling has been used to identify the different media and supports to be analyzed. The time segment of the Climate Week NYC 2019 was chosen because key dates for the objectives of the study converge there. The Decalogue of Recommendations for Reporting on Climate Change (ECODES, 2018)”, endorsed by over 80 media sources in Spain in the years 2018 and 2019, brings together a series of variables for climate change communication analysis including outstanding concepts and values. The results confirm that the media discourse on CC is worded in accordance with the different social, scientific, and political agendas which interact with the media agenda. Particularities have been found in terms of how the information has been treated and the representations of CC, depending on the type of media analyzed. The evaluation also permits the identification of common elements that characterize the media discourse and shows how the acceleration of the six social tipping interventions (STI) identified by Otto et al. (2020) requires the strategic cooperation of the media for social transformation.

Keywords

• Social action
• Communication media
• climate change
• Climate Action Week
• Social mediation