The Conversation: Wildfires – why media coverage doesn’t always make the climate connection

Doug Specht, an expert in climate communication at the University of Westminster, offers an insightful analysis of how the recent wildfires burning in France and Spain (and elsewhere) have been reported, from both UK and French perspectives.

In the UK, he writes:

Europe’s fires were written up as a combination of holidays spoiled, energy policy rows, domestic civil protection issues and continental emergencies. All the articles were true, but what separates them is how far back each story begins. A fire can be explained by today’s barbecue, yesterday’s wind direction, by a dry spring, by four decades of land use change, or by a century of emissions.

Deciding how a story of a wildfire is placed in history, and in the climate change narrative, is often determined by one of three things. First, which desk the story lands on: travel and news desks usually seek stories of disruption, while environmental desks look for causes. Second, how far away the fire is, and third, where the news outlet stands on decarbonisation.

News runs on novelty – something must have changed since yesterday for it to qualify as a story. That is why the moment of ignition is reportable, but the conditions that led to that ignition are usually not.

In France, Specht notes, there has been a shift in narrative.

Looking at how French media report extreme weather, we can see real change in both language and prominence. Bulletins that once described a canicule exceptionnelle — an exceptional heatwave, an oddity — now routinely call these occurrences symptoms of le dérèglement climatique, climate disruption. This is an important shift: exceptions belong to a day; symptoms imply history and trajectory.

Regional papers such as La Dépêche du Midi and Corse-Matin have managed it best, partly because they are still there after the flames die down, reporting replanting, firebreaks and how to keep older residents safe in the heat. That is where a slow process becomes visible: not in the fire, but in the years either side of it.

What next?

Journalism, and news, will not abandon “the event”. Fires are news and they should be reported, urgently, vividly and from the scene.

The issue is how to avoid readers assuming that a fire is the whole story, when the event is, in fact, just the moment at which a long process becomes attention grabbing. When reporting stops there, it is accurate about the day but misleading about the decade.

It is not the the reader or viewer’s job to supply the causal context an article leaves out. To place media literacy as the solution would concede to the idea that reporting will not improve. It is editors and correspondents who have the capacity to responsibly tell the climate story as both drawn-out and very fast events.

This means treating the conditions beforehand as part of the story, rather than merely background. So, a fire report should carry the spring rainfall figures as routinely as it carries the acreage burned. It also means keeping a running memory, so that each fire is reported in light of the last, rather than in isolation.

It means paying for journalists’ return visits because recovery, replanting and adaptation are where a slow process becomes visible. And it means recognising that a newspaper’s disasters desk and environment desk are describing one world, and should not be left to describe two.

The full article is here.