eutrophication and climate change coverage
The rapid increase in the coverage of climate issues since 2006 was an extraordinary event, but the annual share of climate stories still re-mained less than two per cent of all news cover-age (Figure 11). The annual share of news items focusing on climate change remained less than 0.5% of all news. Only one per cent of all news mentioned climate issues during 2010.
The monthly share of climate news of all news reached 2.0% in January 2007 and 2.4%
in February 2007. During the Copenhagen COP15 meeting, the share increased to 2.4% in November 2009 and 2.5% in December 2009.
Partly due to the mild winter, the monthly share was also high in December 2007 (2.5%) and February 2008 (2.3%).
The international climate meetings showed up as distinctive peaks. The greatest shares of news specifically focusing on climate issues were found from November 2009 (1.0%) and December 2009 (0.9%), at the time of the Co-penhagen COP15 meeting. The peaks of two preceding winters were lower. The share of 0.8% was reached during February 2007 and
December 2007. The peaks related to the Kyoto COP3 meeting December 1997 (0.4%) and The Hague meeting November 2000 (0.6%) also gained relatively high shares of all news.
Eutrophication news as a share of all news re-mained relatively low, reaching a peak of 0.2%
in 1998. The shares calculated on a monthly basis were considerably higher, due to the con-centration of coverage in the summertime. The highest monthly share of eutrophication news of all news (0.7%) was reached in July 2003, when the hot and sunny summer weather trig-gered abundant algal occurrences. Almost the same level of eutrophication news (0.6%) was reached in July 1997, July 1998, August 2002 and July 2005.
The annual share of news items focusing specifically on eutrophication remained below 0.1% of all news, reaching 0.09% in 1998 and 0.08% in 2002. These news articles were con-centrated on the summer months, following the pattern of all news mentioning eutrophication or blue-green algae. The highest monthly share (0.4%) was reached in July 2005, followed by July 2003 (0.4%), August 2002 (0.4%), July 1997 (0.4%) and July 1998 (0.3%).
Even though the overall number of climate news surpassed the number of eutrophication news during the whole study period, articles focusing specifically on eutrophication were
published almost as often as news focusing specifically on climate issues throughout most of the 1990s. However, the amount of stories mentioning climate issues as a part of other topics was higher throughout the study period.
The wider treatment of climate issues probably paved the way to the high amount and wide scope of coverage during the last years of the sample.
The results indicate that climate change has been represented by HS as an issue widely con-nected to other issues, while eutrophication has been represented more in isolation from other issues (Figure 12). Eutrophication was only rarely addressed in the culture pages or the economy pages and it was not seen as an international issue to be dealt with in foreign news. Especially regarding the Baltic Sea, eu-trophication reporting tends to localise a cross-national issue. Climate reporting, on the other hand, has brought a global level change into local contexts.
In their study focusing on the role of science in Finnish Baltic Sea eutrophication govern-ance, Pihlajamäki and Tynkkynen (2011, p.
194) briefly note that “a rising topic of discus-sion, although not yet highly popularised, is the impact of climate change on eutrophication.”
The data here supports this notion, although the data allows systematic analysis only at a level
Figure 11. The annual share of climate and eutrophication news from all news items in HS. Note: the figure un-derestimates the share, especially in early 1990 because duplicates remain included in the data describing the total amount of all news. (Source: this research.)
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
News items mentioning climate issues
News items mentioning eutrophication News items focusing on climate issues
News items focusing on eutrophication
% of all news items
of headlines. However, somewhat surprisingly, headlines for eutrophication stories only rarely made an explicit connection between climate change and heatwaves causing algal blooms.
Only nine of the headlines for eutrophication stories mention climate change or the green-house effect. Climate news includes eight head-lines that mention eutrophication or blue-green algae. Since the titles usually focus on only a few issues, these numbers greatly underesti-mate the interactions that are built between these issues by the news texts. For example, an
article entitled “The state of water courses is slowly improving” (17 September 2007) pre-sented climate change as a risk factor threaten-ing the positive development of water quality.
Importantly, an indirect and partly implicit connection between these issues was created by the eutrophication news that represented the sunny and warm summer weather as an ecologi-cal factor regulating algal blooms. So far, warm summer weathers have been typically presented in connection with leisure time and relaxation.
Due to the relatively cold climate conditions
Figure 12. A comparison of the coverage by section of the paper Local news includes the sections: Name of the Day, News from Helsinki, and Where to Go. Lifestyle includes the sections: Price & Quality, Leisure, Life & Health, Housing, Home & Style, Travel, Food & Drink, Cars, and Sport. (Source: this research.)
0 200 400 600 800 1000
Climate change News front page, Eutrophication Climate change Unknown or other, Eutrophication Climate change Sunday pages, Eutrophication Climate change Culture, Eutrophication Climate change Nature & science, Eutrophication Climate change Lifestyle, Eutrophication Climate change Economy, Eutrophication Climate change TV, radio, Eutrophication Climate change Local news, Eutrophication Climate change Editorial, Eutrophication Climate change Foreign news, Eutrophication Climate change Domestic news, Eutrophication Climate change Letters to Editor, Eutrophication
Number of news items
Focus on other issue Focus on climate change or eutrophication
in Finland, summer heatwaves have been gen-erally welcomed and algal blooms have been perceived as a nuisance prohibiting the use of water during comfortably warm periods. If Fin-land is to be increasingly faced with unpleas-antly warm summer weather (Jylhä et al. 2004), this framing is likely to shift towards a framing of warm weather an environmental problem.
5 Discussion: reaching behind the headlines
This chapter discusses the key factors influ-encing newspaper coverage of climate change and eutrophication and re-evaluates the mod-els aimed to explain the development of the coverage. Finally, potential avenues for further research are scoped.