The director of the Autonomous National Parks Agency (OAPN) of the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, María Jesús Rodríguez de Sancho, presented this morning the results of the report “Adaptation to climate change in the Spanish press. Analysis of the media treatment of adaptation to climate change in Spain (2012-2019)”, coinciding with the sixth informative breakfast of the LIFE SHARA project.
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”, finally selecting 508 journalistic pieces that, after their identification and validation, have been characterized according to a set of previously defined variables. The statistical analysis of the results has made it possible to detect relevant trends such as:
– the increased presence of adaptation over the years,
– the still scarce informative relevance of the subject,
– the mainly political framing of the stories, followed by the scientific and the economic,
– an iconographic accompaniment in which images of solutions predominate, over impacts and protests, and where nearby spaces and times are reflected,
– and the concentration of news in a few sectors – of those established in the PNACC: Water, Energy and Biodiversity – compared to the scant attention generated by others, such as Tourism, for example.
The work is part of the set of initiatives of LIFE SHARA 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.
The director of the OAPN stressed in this regard that “the information provided by this study will help us to better guide public communication policy on adaptation to climate change, until we achieve the appropriate knowledge and social recognition of this essential tool for responding to climate challenges”. He also insisted on the fundamental role that the media play and the support they represent for administrations, thanking professionals for their effort to transfer to society informative content, often complex, but enormously relevant for our collective future.
The final part of the report, which can be consulted at AdapteCCa, incorporates a series of proposals prepared by the author in order to contribute to an improvement in the social communication of adaptation to climate change, both by policy makers and communication professionals.
The online informative breakfast was attended by Fernández Reyes, PhD in Journalism from the University of Seville, as well as journalists specialising in the environment and climate change Raúl Rejón and Antonio Cerrillo – author, according to the study itself, of the largest number of news pieces analysed.
A COMMITMENT TO THE EXTENSION OF KNOWLEDGE
The generation, updating and dissemination of knowledge, both on the risks arising from climate change and on response measures, are essential to properly guide and generalise the multiple actions that must be deployed in all sectors, productive areas and territories in the coming years. The social communication of adaptive responses is part of the great task of raising awareness that social agents, and especially administrations and the media, have ahead of them.
One of the objectives of the LIFE SHARA project is to raise awareness and train people about the effects of climate change, as well as to contribute to improving communication on this subject. Thus, these informative breakfasts of the project are spaces aimed at professionals in dissemination and communication in which the most current knowledge on impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change is presented.
LIFE SHARA “Awareness and knowledge for adaptation to climate change” is a project of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, coordinated 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.
