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Media and Climate Change Observatory<\/a> (MeCCO)<\/em> March media attention to climate change and global warming was up 20% throughout the world from the previous month of February 2018. Coverage in Asia was up 44%, Europe increased 17%, Oceania went up 17%, and North America was up 23%. Central\/South America dropped 10%, while coverage in Africa decreased 31%. In the Middle East, numbers remained relatively on par with February 2018 counts. Global numbers were about a third though of those (66% less) from counts a year ago (March 2017) when a great deal of global media attention was focused on US President Donald J. Trump\u2019s plans to dismantle former US President Barack Obama\u2019s Climate Action Plan along with high winter temperatures in northern locations like the Arctic circle.<\/p>\n Figure 1 above shows these ebbs and flows in media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from January 2004 through March 2018.<\/p>\n At the country level in March 2018, coverage went down compared to February only in Germany (-29%). It was up in all other countries monitored: the United Kingdom (UK) (+17%), Canada (+7%), Australia (+4%), India (+59%), Spain (+26%), New Zealand (+42%) and the United States (+30%). Through MeCCO\u2019s monitoring of six world radio sources (Figure 2 below), we can see that coverage has gone up from the previous month by 44%. Coverage in March 2018 compared to a year ago though (March 2017) was down 34%.<\/p>\n Moving to considerations of content of climate change or global warming coverage in March 2018, Figure 3 below shows word frequency data at the country levels in global newspapers and radio, juxtaposed with US newspapers and US television in March 2018. It is notable that the US-based media sources showed continuing yet diminishing signs of \u2018Trump Dump\u2019 (where media attention that would have focused on other climate-related events and issues instead was placed on Trump-related actions (leaving many other stories untold)). And as in previous months, content in media reporting outside the US context shows that this pattern of news reporting continues to be limited to the US. To illustrate, March 2018 news articles related to climate change or global warming in the US invoked \u2018Trump\u2019 2139 times through the 354 stories this month (a ratio of 6 times per article on average) in\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>,\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>,\u00a0USA Today<\/em>, and the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>. In US television sources of\u00a0ABC<\/em>,\u00a0CBS<\/em>,\u00a0CNN<\/em>,\u00a0Fox News Network<\/em>,\u00a0MSNBC,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0NBC<\/em>, Trump was mentioned 1873 times in 72 news segments (a whopping 26 mentions per segment). In contrast, in the UK press, Trump was mentioned in the\u00a0Daily Mail & Mail on Sunday<\/em>,\u00a0Guardian & the Observer<\/em>, the\u00a0Sun<\/em>, the\u00a0Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph<\/em>, the\u00a0Daily Mirror & Sunday Mirror<\/em>, the\u00a0Scotsman & Scotland on Sunday<\/em>, and the\u00a0Times & Sunday Times<\/em>\u00a0595 times in 522 March articles (approximately 1.1 mentions per article on average).<\/p>\n As has been noted in previous MeCCO summaries, however, these current trends can quickly change if the Trump Administration again focuses attention on climate change or global warming in the months to come.<\/p>\n Many media accounts in March focused on primarily\u00a0political<\/em>\u00a0content associated with climate change and global warming. For example, at the start of March, it was revealed through leaked emails to\u00a0The New York Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0that the location and accessibility of oil and natural gas drove decision-making by the Trump Administration to open up\u00a0Bears Ears National Monument<\/a>\u00a0in southeastern Utah. In email exchanges with the US Department of Energy, top US elected officials like Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch is credited with pushing for the shrinking of the protected space by 85% in order to help resolve commercial mineral rights disputes (specifically coal deposits in the Kaiparowits plateau). As another example, journalists William Boston and Max Bernhard from\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em>\u00a0reported that the German automakers Volkswagen (who had been previously found guilty in an emissions test cheating scandal) announced plans to produce up to 3 million electric vehicles each year through 2025. And in later March, journalist Chris Mooney from\u00a0The Washington Post<\/a><\/em>\u00a0ran one of many stories in media outlets around the globe of a conscious re-coupling of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and GDP. Departing from a trend in the last three years of flat CO2 emissions amid growing economies, a released International Energy Agency report announced a 1.4% CO2 increase in 2017, saying \u201cif the world wants to cut emissions quickly and meet climate goals laid out in the Paris climate agreement, clean energy needs to grow about five times faster each year between now and 2040\u201d As a final example of political content in March, the\u00a0Financial Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0reported on new plans afoot in Saudi Arabia (by a Japanese investment company called\u00a0SoftBank<\/a>) to build what would become the world\u2019s largest solar-power-generation-project, bringing along approximately 100,000 clean energy jobs to the Middle East.<\/p>\n Meanwhile in March, coverage relating primarily to the\u00a0cultural\u00a0<\/em>dimensions continued to draw attention. To illustrate, journalist Fiona Harvey wrote in\u00a0The Guardian<\/a><\/em>\u00a0about a new World Bank report that forecasts as many as 143 million displaced people by 2050 (mainly from South Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa) due to the impacts of climate change. On the consumption side of the equation, journalist Zlati Meyer from\u00a0USA Today<\/a><\/em>\u00a0reported on a mid-March announcement from global food chain McDonald\u2019s that they would be cutting their CO2 emissions from their supply chain (e.g. beef production practices) by approximately 31% by 2030.<\/p>\n Media stories also intersected with\u00a0ecological<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0meteorological<\/em>\u00a0issues across the globe in March 2018. For example, the multiple winter storms that hit the Northeastern US (called \u2018Nor\u2019easters\u2019) garnered media attention. For example, Christopher Joyce from\u00a0US National Public Radio<\/a>\u00a0reported on flooding dimensions of these storms becoming a new normal in future years, according to research from the\u00a0National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)<\/a>. Joyce quoted NOAA\u2019s\u00a0Dr. William Sweet<\/a>who said, \u201cThe numbers are staggering… The problem is going to become chronic rather quickly. It’s not going to be a slow, gradual change”.<\/p>\n Attention was also paid to\u00a0scientific<\/em>\u00a0dimensions of climate change and global warming. For instance, journalist Jonathan Watts from\u00a0The Guardian<\/a><\/em>\u00a0covered a new report from the United Nations-sponsored\u00a0Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services<\/a>. It stated that the world’s biodiversity has been shrinking at an alarming rate, and human activities like climate change are responsible. The report outlined stark predictions such as Africa losing half of bird and mammal species by 2100, Asia losing all of its commercial fishing by mid-century, and a 15% reduction in plant and animal species in the Americas by 2050. Also, journalists Kendra Pierre-Louis, Nadja Popvich and Adam Piece at\u00a0The New York Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0reported on satellite measurements from the\u00a0National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)<\/a>\u00a0(a center within the\u00a0Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences<\/a>\u00a0where MeCCO is also housed) showed the second-lowest annual Arctic ice cover maximum ever recorded. NSIDC Director\u00a0Mark Serreze<\/a>\u00a0lamented, \u201cit\u2019s a case where we hate to say we told you so, but we told you so\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6we\u2019ve probably known for 100 years that as the climate warms up in response to loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, we would see the changes first in the Arctic\u201d.<\/p>\n As spring melt leads into summer heat in 2018, MeCCO will continue to track the ebbs and flows of climate change or global warming coverage in 74 media sources (newspapers, radio and TV) in 38 countries in seven different regions around the world.<\/p>\n – report prepared by Max Boykoff, Jennifer Katzung and Ami Nacu-Schmidt<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) March 2018 Summary March media attention to climate change and global warming was up 20% throughout the world from the previous month of February 2018. Coverage in Asia was up 44%, Europe increased 17%, … Continue reading
\nMarch 2018 Summary<\/a><\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/sciencepolicy.colorado.edu\/icecaps\/research\/media_coverage\/summaries\/images\/2018_15_figure2.jpg\")
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