Our House Is Burning: Discrepancy in Climate Change vs. Biodiversity Coverage in the Media as Compared to Scientific Literature

Abstract

Scientists, policy makers, and journalists are three key, interconnected players involved in prioritizing and implementing solutions to mitigate the consequences of anthropogenic pressures on the environment. The way in which information is framed and expertise is communicated by the media is crucial for political decisions and for the integrated management of environmental issues. Here we present a comparative study of scientific literature and press articles addressing climate change and biodiversity. We extensively scrutinized the scientific literature, research funding, and press articles from the USA, Canada, and United Kingdom addressing climate change and biodiversity issues between 1991 and 2016. We found that media coverage of climate change was up to eight times higher compared to biodiversity. This discrepancy could not be explained by different scientific output between the two issues. Moreover, climate change media coverage was often related to specific events whereas no such indication of a connection was found in the case of biodiversity. An international communication strategy is urgently required to raise public awareness on biodiversity issues. We discussed several initiatives that scientists could undertake to better communicate major discoveries to the public and policy makers.

Analyzing Google search data to debunk myths about the public's interest in conservation

“…We believe that conservation scientists can and should be more aggressive and strategic about communicating their results (Legagneux et al . ). For instance, by using Google Trends and other culturomics tools for tracking trends on social media platforms (Ladle et al .…”

“…Moreover, some conservationists also believe that what limited "bandwidth" the public dedicates to environmental causes has become swamped by global warming and climate change, which could lead to an artificial decoupling of these topics from other environmental issues, many of which are tightly linked to climate change (Novacek 2008;Veríssimo et al 2014;Legagneux et al 2018). The fear that public interest in conser-vation is being overwhelmed by climate change (Curry et al 2007;Novacek 2008) could be justified, or it may be an artifact of the way many polling datasets are collected, in that the commonly used "most important problem" (MIP) technique restricts the number of issues that an individual respondent can raise as MIP; if there is an increase in one issue being raised as MIP, it unavoidably leads to decreases in other issues.…”

“…The public appears to pay attention to both climate change and biodiversity conservation simultaneously, and may not see these two topics as disconnected (Figure 3), despite a recent finding that media coverage of biodiversity issues is lower than that of climate change (Legagneux et al 2018). In fact, interest in these two broad topics is tightly and positively correlated (WebFigures 5 and 6), as short-term increases in interest in climate change correspond to similar increases in interest in extinction and endangered species.…”

“…; Legagneux et al . ). The fear that public interest in conservation is being overwhelmed by climate change (Curry et al .…”

Taste of Life: Science outreach made delicious

“…A recent review of scientific literature and press articles identified a deficit in biodiversity communication, reporting that media coverage of biodiversity loss was, on average, less than one third that of climate change (Legagneux et al, ). While the authors posit various reasons for these findings, they do not mention what we perceive to be one of the most salient: the public is not concerned about biodiversity loss because they do not notice the presence of biodiversity in the first place.…”