The director of the National Parks Autonomous Agency presented the results of the report during the sixth informative breakfast of the LIFE SHARA project

The director of the Autonomous National Parks Agency (OAPN) of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, María Jesús Rodríguez de Sancho, has presented the results of the report “Adaptation to climate change in the Spanish press. “, during the sixth informative breakfast of the LIFE SHARA project, where he stressed that “this study will help us to improve knowledge on adaptation to climate change, until we achieve the appropriate social recognition of this essential tool for responding to climate challenges”.

The study, prepared by researcher Rogelio Fernández Reyes and coordinated by the OAPN through the CENEAM (National Center for Environmental Education), presents an image of the trends observed in the news treatment of adaptation to climate change in the Spanish press based on the identification and analysis of all the journalistic pieces on this issue that appeared in four widely circulated newspapers -El País, El Mundo, La Vanguardia and Expansión- during the period between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2019.

The unit of study has been each article that included the terms “adaptation” and “climate change”, “global warming” or “climate crisis”. 508 journalistic pieces have been selected that, after their identification and validation, have been characterized according to a set of previously defined variables. The analysis yields, among others, the following conclusions: the increase in the presence of adaptation over the years; adaptation is an area of information that has not yet been explored, the coverage is good, but not enough to raise the informative status of adaptation; The focus is first on political sources, followed by scientific and economic sources; water, biodiversity and agriculture are the sectors that are the focus of the media, but others included in the PNACC (such as forests, health or tourism) remain unnoticed.

The report also incorporates a series of proposals to contribute to an improvement in social communication on adaptation to climate change. Among which are “to stress the importance of training and to put the accent on practices of what we would call ‘maladaptation'” and “to delve into the different types of adaptation, to focus on the local and the close and to look from the bottom up”, said Fernández Reyes.

The informative meeting was attended by the author of the report, accompanied by two journalists specialising in the environment and climate change: Raúl Rejón, from eldiario.es, and Antonio Cerrillo, from La Vanguardia, author, according to the study itself, of the largest number of news pieces analysed.

This initiative is part of the set of LIFE SHARA initiatives aimed at “promoting the improvement of the treatment of adaptation to climate change by the media”, and aimed to collect useful information on the social representation of adaptation as an essential line of response to the phenomenon of climate change, through its presence in the press.

ABOUT LIFE SHARA

LIFE SHARA “Awareness and knowledge for adaptation to climate change” is a project of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, through the Biodiversity Foundation, the Spanish Office for Climate Change, the Autonomous Agency for National Parks and the State Meteorological Agency, and of which the Portuguese Environment Agency is also a member. The project is co-funded by the European Commission through the LIFE programme.

The LIFE SHARA project aims to collaborate in the construction of a society better adapted to climate change, cooperating with all the actors involved, generating knowledge and increasing social awareness. It does so through platforms such as AdapteCCa, which has, among other tools, a  case study module, a image bank with more than 440 photographs or a a viewer of climate change scenarios that, when incorporated into management processes, can be very useful in addressing adaptation to climate change in Spain.

Do you want to know more about the LIFE SHARA project? Here you have all the information.