Representations of Pacific Islands and climate change in US, UK, and Australian newspaper reporting

Abstract

Pacific Islands often exemplify climate change vulnerability, yet little scholarship has probed how these representations translate to the media. This study examines newspaper articles about Pacific Islands and climate change in American, British, and Australian newspapers from 1999 to 2018, analyzing volume, content, and dominant narratives. These quantitative results are complemented by semi-structured interviews with journalists as well as Pacific stakeholders who engage with the media. Reporting on Pacific Islands and climate change focuses heavily on who and what are at risk from climate impacts; reporting on solutions is less frequent and dominated by discussions of migration. This overemphasis on vulnerability potentially downplays the importance of the resiliency and action of Pacific Island communities and positions the Pacific as a site for climate catastrophe, rather than climate justice. However, recent reporting may be moving away from overarching narratives of vulnerability, motivating continued research into these depictions and how they promote or discourage climate action.

Evaluating the computational (“Big Data”) turn in studies of media coverage of climate change

“…One of these studies was that by Broadbent et al (2016), which is discussed in the next section titled "Key findings." As further confirmation that few "global" studies exist, my search in the references lists of the four mentioned studies also did not reveal additional studies fitting this description, nor did a search in the more recent (2020) three-country analysis of newspaper climate coverage by Shea et al (2020), nor my examination of articles that cite Barkemeyer et al's, 2017 article before the year 2021 (I found these searching for articles that cite their article between January 2018 and 31 December 2020, according to Google Scholar). 4 Schmidt et al used complex, broadly-defined search strings to perform full-text searches in electronic databases, but performed manual checks of each article to ensure relevance (p. 1240).…”

Attitudes towards climate migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand: the roles of climate change beliefs and immigration attitudes

“…Consequently, they might believe that major-emitting states have a responsibility to welcome all migrants from nations with an elevated risk of environmental degradation. However, there is much ambiguity surrounding migration drivers, given the routine omission of the historical and structural causes of climate 'vulnerability' in the Pacific (Dreher and Voyer 2015;Shea et al 2020). Hosts may be unaware of justice-based arguments for accepting climate migrants (c.f.…”

“…Nevertheless, mainstream media coverage tends to ignore these complexities. Climate migrants are frequently framed as 'victims', 'refugees' or as 'vulnerable' to climate change, rather than as migrants deserving of justice (Belfer et al 2017;Dreher and Voyer 2015;Shea et al 2020). Many Pacific communities are resisting these narratives, preferring to tell their own stories as agents of change who choose when, where and how to migrate (Dreher and Voyer 2015;Herrmann 2017).…”

Power, the Pacific Islands, and the Prestige Press: A Case Study of How Climate Reporting is Influenced by UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Summits

“…In the periods before COPs, and during the rest of the year, when much of the negotiation agenda setting is occurring, the dominant language does not reflect the calls from Pacific Island leaders. In these periods, vulnerability language and general solutions appear more frequently, which as shown by Shea et al (2020), are dominated by discussions of migration-imbued with an inherent notion of vulnerability and unsupported by many Pacific stakeholders. If UNFCCC agenda setting is influenced by the media landscape, then the rhetoric in these articles limits the types of futures that can be imagined for Pacific nations at COPs: If solutions like migration-which emphasize the impossibility of averting impacts-are already dominant, why would negotiators focus on funding for adaptation or forcing mitigation in other countries?…”