Media And The Politics Of Arctic Climate Change

Combining multidisciplinary perspectives and new research, this volume goes beyond broad discussions of the impacts of climate change and reflects on the current and historical mediations and narratives that are part of creating this new social and scientific reality.

Combining multidisciplinary perspectives and new research, this volume goes beyond broad discussions of the impacts of climate change and reflects on the current and historical mediations and narratives that are part of creating this new social and scientific reality.

Arctic Geopolitics, Media and Power provides a fresh way of looking at the potential and limitations of regional international governance in the Arctic region. Far-reaching impacts of climate change, its wealth of resources and potential for new commercial activities have placed the Arctic region into the political limelight. In an era of rapid environmental change, the Arctic provides a complex and challenging case of geopolitical interplay. Based on analyses of how actors from within and outside the Arctic region assert their interests and how such discourses travel in the media, this book scrutinizes the social and material contexts within which new imaginaries, spatial constructs and scalar preferences emerge. It places ground-breaking attention to shifting media landscapes as a critical component of the social, environmental and technological change. It also reflects on the fundamental dilemmas inherent in democratic decision making at a time when an urgent need for addressing climate change is challenged by conflicting interests and growing geopolitical tensions. This book will be of great interest to geography academics, media and communication studies and students focusing on policy, climate change and geopolitics, as well as policy-makers and NGOs working within the environmental sector or with the Arctic region. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9780367189822 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Scientists and politicians are increasingly using the language of risk to describe the climate change challenge. Some researchers have argued that stressing the 'risks' posed by climate change rather than the 'uncertainties' can create a more helpful context for policy makers and a stronger response from the public. However, understanding the concepts of risk and uncertainty - and how to communicate them - is a hotly debated issue. In this book, James Painter analyses how the international media present these and other narratives surrounding climate change. He focuses on the coverage of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the melting ice of the Arctic Sea, and includes six countries: Australia, France, India, Norway, the UK and the USA.

This edited collection explores how narratives about the future of the Arctic have been produced historically up until the present day. The contemporary deterministic and monolithic narrative is shown to be only one of several possible ways forward. This book problematizes the dominant prediction that there will be increased shipping and resource extraction as the ice melts and shows how this seemingly inevitable future has consequences for the action that can be taken in the present. This collection looks to historical projections about the future of the Arctic, evaluating why some voices have been heard and championed, while others remain marginalised. It questions how these historical perspectives have shaped resource allocation and governance structures to understand the forces behind change in the Arctic region. Considering the history of individuals and institutions, their political and economic networks and their perceived power, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on how the future of the Arctic has been produced and communicated.

For many years, the objective of environmental campaigners was to push climate change on to the agenda of political leaders and to encourage media attention to the issue. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it appeared that their efforts had been spectacularly successful. Yet just at the moment when the campaigners’ goals were being achieved, it seemed that the idea of getting the issue into mainstream discussion had been mistaken all along; that the consensus-building approach produced little or no meaningful action. That is the problem of climate change as a ‘post-political’ issue, which is the subject of this book. Examining how climate change is communicated in politics, news media and celebrity culture, Climate Change and Post-Political Communication explores how the issue has been taken up by elites as potentially offering a sense of purpose or mission in the absence of political visions of the future, and considers the ways in which it provides a focus for much broader anxieties about a loss of modernist political agency and meaning. Drawing on a wide range of literature and case studies, and taking a critical and contextual approach to the analysis of climate change communication, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental studies, communication studies, and media and film studies.

Scientists and politicians are increasingly using the language of risk to describe the climate change challenge. Some researchers have argued that stressing the 'risks' posed by climate change rather than the 'uncertainties' can create a more helpful context for policy makers and a stronger response from the public. However, understanding the concepts of risk and uncertainty - and how to communicate them - is a hotly debated issue. In this book, James Painter analyses how the international media present these and other narratives surrounding climate change. He focuses on the coverage of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the melting ice of the Arctic Sea, and includes six countries: Australia, France, India, Norway, the UK and the USA.

This book documents how the Arctic region has been represented in the media: exploring how the media has framed the Arctic and whether this has an impact on governmental decision-making and public preferences. The Arctic region faces profound transformations, due to global warming, spurring intense debates about economic growth, environmental protection, and socio-cultural development. At the same time, most of humanity will never come face-to-face with the realities of the region: the media represents our only opportunity to learn about what this evolving region stands for. Recognizing that media coverage will tend to focus on specific events and relay specific messages, this book scrutinizes the nature of these messages to figure out how the Arctic region is presented by different media outlets. Studying different types of media, Landriault conducts an analysis of 628 newspaper articles, 110 televised reports, 9 magazine articles, and 404 tweets to provide the first systematic and rigorous study of Arctic media representations. This book will interest scholars, practitioners, and students in Arctic studies, critical geography, political science, and communication studies.

This edited collection addresses climate change journalism from the perspective of temporality, showcasing how various time scales—from geology, meteorology, politics, journalism, and lived cultures—interact with journalism around the world. Analyzing the meetings of and schisms between various temporalities as they emerge from reporting on climate change globally, Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time asks how climate change as a temporal process gets inscribed within the temporalities of journalism. The overarching question of climate change journalism and its relationship to temporality is considered through the themes of environmental justice and slow violence, editorial interventions, ecological loss, and political and religious contexts, which are in turn explored through a selection of case studies from the US, France, Thailand, Brazil, Australia, Spain, Mexico, Canada, and the UK. This is an insightful resource for students and scholars in the fields of journalism, media studies, environmental communication, and communications generally.

The Arctic has often been seen as a natural area, or even a “wilderness”, where mainly indigenous and subsistence activities have been prominent. Contrary to this, the present volume highlights the very long historical development of resource use systems in northern Europe, across multiple actors and multiple levels, and including varying population groups. The book takes a past-present-future perspective that illustrates the paths to institutional emergence, change or persistence over time. It also illustrates how institutions may themselves drive changes, through a focus on resource use cases in northern Europe. This volume demonstrates that understanding “northern” issues is less about understanding sets of geophysical, climatological or environmental conditions than about understanding social and institutional structures. Understanding these trajectories into the future is seen as a key way of understanding what responses to future change may be likely and what the institutions are that will shape, limit or enable our responses to climate change. This book will be of great use to scholars and graduates in the fields of Arctic and northern-region politics, and to researchers of resource use and climate change with a focus on vulnerability, social vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation.