The value of environmental communication research

The media system remains the principal arena in which competing accounts of climate change struggle for visibility, credibility, and legitimacy. As the environment became a crucial social and political issue, it was only natural to observe the rise of what has been dubbed as ‘environmental communication research’ (Hansen, 2011).

Recent years have thus witnessed increasing interest among communication scholars from a range of subfields in investigating how the media are reporting climate change. Since the 90 s we have seen the tremendous growth in journal articles across a range of different disciplines specifically centred on environmental communication (Anderson, 2009). Likewise, the field of journalism studies has produced a significant body of work concerning ecology and risk communication analysis (Boyce and Lewis, 2009; Cottle, 2009; Cox, 2010; Hansen, 2010; Lester, 2010). There are also a few studies that have taken a comparative perspective (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004; Marisa and Brulle, 2003). Critical discourse analysis has also proved particularly helpful in disentangling the symbolic values of environmental public communication and media coverage (Carvalho, 2007).

When asked to reflect about the future agenda of environmental communication research, its achievements and failures, we should ask two fundamental questions: is environmental communication research returning something of value to society? Is it interdisciplinary enough?

As it was highlighted in an International Panel on Climate Change presented within the Political Economy Section at the 2015 edition of IAMCR organised by myself and Professor Graham Murdock, there is a pressing need for environmental communication to engage with queries that are already familiar to scholars in media studies: questions about inequalities in power and resources – specifically among the gatekeepers influencing and shaping environmental communication (Anderson, 2009), but also questions about the materiality of communication systems as environmentally hazardous machines.

If we agree with Lazarsfeld’s point that research should aim at developing ‘a theory of the prevailing trends in our times, general trends which yet require consideration in any concrete research problem’ (Lazarsfeld, 1972: 160) then perhaps environmental communication has yet to meet this goal.

Research on the communication strategies of news sources and media coverage of ecology has made impressive advances, but did we develop a theory that makes sense of major dynamics generated by the transnational issue of climate change?

More precisely, the mounting evidence that we are now at a critical juncture in decisions over how to address the intensifying impacts of global warming coincides with two other major dynamics of change – the digitalisation of communication systems and the globalisation of consumer culture. It is the complex intersection of these trends that should provide the starting point for an overall communication theory that would reflect ‘ideas of basic human values’ (Lazarsfeld, 1972: 160) and would inform our environmental decision making, public awareness, and the development of sustainability projects.

A discipline like environmental communication is per se necessarily interdisciplinary, so as communication researchers we need to work more towards an integration of concepts and findings from closer discipline such as political ecology, environmental sociology, and environmental studies.

Perhaps one of the most successful interdisciplinary achievements of the field has been the very recent development of a stream of environmental communication that looks at the ecological impact of communication systems (Maxwell and Miller, 2010). Communication systems require complex infrastructures that support production, storage, transmission, presentation, access, and use, and are encountered in everyday life though a proliferating array of machines: wide screen TV, smart phones, tablets, games consoles. In other words, producing and servicing communications infrastructures have major implications for energy consumption and waste disposal (Gabrys, 2014). Consequently, this is a promising area of intellectual inquiry within the field of environmental communication that we should develop as a matter of priority.

If our goal in developing knowledge is to produce public value, research projects in the field of communication studies should:

Understand how the dynamics of digitisation, globalisation and intensified consumerism have intersected with the climate crisis;

These are just a few areas for development that we might pursue if our intent is to deliver value to our societies (Servaes, 2012): a better understanding of the complex dynamics that determine global action on one of the most pressing problems of our times.