Filter by keyword: Environmental communication

Keeping citizens informed about the sea is important because it can motivate collective actions to address threats to coastal and marine sustainability. In this article, we wondered how European science and environmental journalists cover marine issues in the print media. We conducted 26 interviews with press journalists in 13 European countries and asked about topics, triggers, and sources to write marine-related news. We found that climate change, marine pollution, and biodiversity are the most important issues and that good working relationships with both scientists and NGOs are key for this media coverage.

When trying to sensitize adolescents for sustainability, innovative communication approaches are needed. In the outdoor escape “Zombie mission”, players follow a story and try to save the world by solving puzzles about sustainability topics with scientific information found in the university gardens. This study investigates to whom this scientainment approach appeals and whether it can impart knowledge and raise interest in science and the environment. A mixed methods approach was adopted using questionnaires and interviews. The results suggest that the game is a promising tool for communicating sustainability to adolescents, even those who may not have had prior interest in the environment or science. Participants enjoyed the activity and gained new knowledge as a result.

Video abstracts, filmed versions of scientific written abstracts, are an exciting trend in the world of online science videos, but, to date, the classification, conception and reception of these videos still need to be explored. This study aims to identify the most and least valued features, exploring future guidelines for producing an effective video abstract. For this purpose, 30 science video experts watched 21 video abstracts and filled out a questionnaire. Content analysis showed that video abstracts in Ecology and Environmental Sciences should be short, clear, objective, creative, dynamic and informative, mixing impactful live images with animation.

Street art is visual art in public spaces — public art — created for public visibility. Street art addresses a massive and extremely diverse audience: everyone in a city. Using a case study approach, this article explores: 1) the extent to which science-inspired environmental street art can be considered a vehicle for science communication in less tangible science contexts and institutional settings — on the street — and 2) the strategies that street artists deploy to communicate their environmental messages through large-scale painted murals. This article clarifies how street art can be understood as a means of creative grassroots environmental communication. It shows that, and how, street art can encourage agency in pro-environmentalism and help to develop our relationship with sustainability.

Living Labs need to improve their performance to address urgent social and environmental sustainability challenges. A framework combining the dimensions of environment and focus, methods and collaborative action, and outcomes with a life cycle perspective allowed analysing four Living Labs in the Netherlands and Indonesia. These Living Labs present differences in environment but are similar for the focus on sustainability transition processes. The reflection reveals the importance of considering public engagement and participation needed to foster a responsible approach and a sustainable performance of Living Labs.

In this article, the authors aim to reflect on the relationship between collaborative creation and creativity ('co-creativity') within Living Lab (LL) research and innovation in the domain of agri-food systems.While the value of LL is often perceived to be the collaboration among its participants, there is a need to capture and measure the process of co-creation.Co-creativity is indicated by the literature to be a necessary research and collaborative component of social change, as well as for promoting a transformative sustainability agenda.This article uses empirical and primary data collected in the context of the DIVINFOOD project to show the extent to which researchers actively promote, manage and respond to the effects of collaborative creativity within their research. Collaborative creativity is an indispensable component of the co-creation process because it supports collaborative learning. The authors conclude that measuring co-creativity could be an interesting indicator to monitor the development of LLs over time.

News media is one of the main sources of information for many people around the world on climate change. It not only increases awareness among the public but also has the potential to sensitize people toward climate change impacts. To date, few studies focus on media coverage of climate change in low-income countries such as Pakistan which is among the top ten countries impacted by global warming. This study used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and analyzed 7,655 climate change-related news articles published between 2010 and 2021 in three Pakistani English newspapers. Our results suggest that climate change coverage in Pakistan has substantially increased over the years, however, the focus has generally been on “climate politics,” “climate governance and policy,” and “climate change and society.” Evolution of the different themes and their potential impacts on people are discussed.

This study aims to contribute knowledge about how an environmental issue is discursively forged notwithstanding the prevalence of significant scientific uncertainty. This is done by studying the production of news about artificial turf as a microplastic pollutant in Sweden. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 journalists and editors, public officials, politicians, industry representatives and experts, all involved in the issue of artificial turf. The study shows how media logic, among other factors, informs the interpretations of the uncertainties surrounding artificial turf as an environmental problem and concludes that the power of media logic needs to be considered also in the construction of other scientifically charged issues.

To better understand the structure, development, and function of the climate change communication knowledge domain, we performed time-evolving bibliometric mapping and topic modeling on 2,995 climate change communication publications from Web of Science. Structural and visual representations of scholarship are useful for identifying areas of opportunity and coordinating effort in interdisciplinary and action-oriented knowledge domains. Our analysis reveals a cohesive and dense yet ossified knowledge structure which suggests that while a systems approach is being applied in climate communication, there is a need to explore more constitutive strategies for the communication of climate change.

The ocean has a vast capacity for absorbing heat and carbon dioxide, seriously threatening local habitats for marine life. Challenges in connecting wider society with this crisis may originate in its poor visibility for non-specialists: the data can be inaccessible and hard to relate to. In a series of immersive community workshops, participants created artworks combining recent physical ocean climate data recorded in Otago, New Zealand, with impacts on local species from published studies. We found that crafting visual stories was a powerful way to distill greater meaning from complex climate data, and engage participants with harmful changes underway locally.