Media and Climate Change Observatory Monthly Summary: The planet is on "red alert" because governments are failing to meet their climate change goals - Issue 50, February 2021

Fernández-Reyes, Rogelio; Boykoff, Max; Aoyagi, Midori; Katzung, Jennifer; Nacu-Schmidt, Ami; Pearman, Olivia

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/articles/1v53jz11r

Abstract

February is always a short month. In our summaries, we compare month-to-month and year-to-year coverage rather than articles or segments per day. That can slightly skew interpretations of ebbs and flows compared to previous months (January 2021). That said, with our open-source databases posted each month, we welcome readers to download those sources and run other analyses such as number of articles per day in certain places (e.g. Japan) and comparing them then to other days or weeks or other places (e.g. Australia) across our multi-year databases that our twenty-five member Media and Climate Change (MeCCO) team around the world provide each month. With that in mind, our MeCCO team detected that in February 2021, media coverage of climate change or global warming around the world decreased 21% from January 2021. February 2021 levels were 3% lower than coverage in leap-year February 2020 but is up 28% from the levels of coverage two years earlier (February 2019). A year ago, February 2020 was a time when we were on the precipice of media coverage of climate change dropping off dramatically in March 2020, largely due to media and public attention shifting significantly to the emergent COVID-19 pandemic. That said, as the climate has continued to change in the interim year, media attention still has not recovered to those pre-pandemic monthly levels at the global scale. Figure 1 shows trends in newspaper media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from January 2004 through January 2021.

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