Journalists covering a major climate report in 2022 broke with a “historical tradition” of focusing on the negative impacts of climate change, shifting instead to “positive, solutions-based reporting”, a study has found.
The research, published in Climatic Change, looks at the way US and UK news outlets covered the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2022 report on the mitigation of climate change.
The findings “strongly suggest a shift in emphasis” to climate solutions in climate-change reporting, the authors say.
They note that previous IPCC reports “did not receive such an overwhelmingly positive, and at times even optimistic, message”.
However, the response to the report was significantly less optimistic on social media, where popular posts were more likely to focus on a “sense of hopelessness” and the “dire” nature of the climate threat, the authors say.
The findings contribute to the growing literature on the changing nature of media coverage as climate impacts become more frequent and severe, and groups opposed to climate action shift tactics.
Priority messages
The research looks at the media response to the report published in April 2022 by the IPCC’s Working Group III (WG3), as part of the influential body’s sixth assessment report cycle (AR6). (See Carbon Brief’s in-depth coverage.)
The report provides an overview of the world’s progress on tackling greenhouse emissions, while also examining the different sources of emissions. It is one of three comprehensive scientific assessments published each five-to-seven year IPCC assessment cycle, alongside reports on the physical science basis for climate change and its impacts.
To assess the media’s response to the WG3 report, the researchers identify 12 “official priority messages” promoted by the IPCC around its launch.
These are based on the news release, the press conference, headline statements in the report’s summary for policymakers section, and social-media posts sent out by the IPCC’s communication team.
The table below sets out the IPCC’s key messages, as identified by the researchers, ranging from the headline “there are options available now in all sectors” to more specific messages around the need to decarbonise buildings and industry, and ramp up finance to developing countries.
The researchers then assess the presence (mentions) and dominance (inclusion in headline, top five sentences, or as a strong narrative throughout) of these “key messages” in 66 articles published over 4-6 April on more than 20 popular UK and US news websites.
They also look at how the 12 main messages aligned with 56 of the most popular social media posts about the report on Facebook and Twitter.
A small sample
The study’s media sample focuses on articles published by the top 12 most popular online news sites in the UK and US, as identified by Reuters Institute’s 2021 digital news report, with a few exceptions.
The sample features left-leaning publications, such as the Guardian and the New York Times, centre-right outlets, including the Times and the Financial Times, and right-leaning titles, such as the Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal.
Regional newspapers and local television websites were missed due to a lack of coverage of the report.
The authors say they chose to focus on news media in the UK and US because the two countries are host to “legacy media organisations” that have a “strong worldwide presence in English (particularly online), host sceptical voices and are influential amongst policymakers outside of their home countries”.
The social-media sample includes posts by authors, news organisations, scientists, journalists and pro- and anti-climate action groups.
Dr James Painter – an author of the study and research associate at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism – tells Carbon Brief the sample size was relatively small largely due to a muted media response to the report. He adds:
“Sixty six [articles] isn’t a huge sample compared to other studies, but it is big enough to be robust and broad enough in terms of a spectrum of types of media outlets and political leaning.”
Solutions-focused coverage
The study notes that coverage “seldom deviated from the main messages the IPCC was promoting”.
The three most mentioned messages are:
- “There are options available to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” (70%)
- “Major transformations in the energy sector are needed into renewables” (67%)
- “A substantial reduction in fossil fuels is needed” (63%)
A majority of articles (54%) also mention the IPCC’s recommendation that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) solutions are necessary to bring down emissions.
The bar chart below shows the percentage of UK and US media coverage that included the IPCC’s key messages, with UK media represented in dark blue and US media in light blue.
The authors say the paper provides a “detailed case study of which solutions get the most traction – and most critiques – in the media coverage of a policy event”.
For example, it notes how the least-mentioned solutions were sectoral measures focused on reducing the climate impact of industry, cities and buildings, and ramping up finance to poorer nations.
Painter says he believes the downgrading of these particular messages was a product of the space constraints of online journalism, which led journalists to prioritise “key findings” and “controversial” topics, such as CDR.
Break from the past
The research acknowledges that solutions-focused media coverage of the WG3 report is “to be expected”, given the document’s focus on climate mitigation options.
However, the researchers note that media coverage of the previous iteration of the WG3 report – published in 2014 – did not focus on solutions.
They point to a 2015 study that found the dominant frames of coverage were “settled science” and “political and ideological struggle”.
They also highlight analysis published in 2016 that finds a “low presence of the opportunity of action frame compared to disaster and uncertainty framing” in the response to all three key reports of the fifth IPCC assessment cycle.
As a result, the study authors argue the news media’s focus on solutions in reporting of the latest WG3 report “confirms a trend to more solutions coverage” observed by other researchers.
The research also notes the response to the 2022 WG3 report “to a large extent may have been prompted by the IPCC’s communication approach”.
However, Sigourney Luz, digital media and communications manager at Imperial College London and communications manager for the WG3 report, tells Carbon Brief that this is “difficult to determine”.
This shift could also be down to the nature of the report or “part of a broader trend in climate reporting”, she says, adding that “both media coverage of climate change and the scope of IPCC reports have evolved” between 2014 and 2022.
Dr Jill E Hopke, an associate professor of journalism at DePaul University, who was not involved in the study, says it is “encouraging” to see traditional media reflect the IPCC’s priorities. However, she adds that reporting of solutions remains scarce in reporting on climate impacts:
“The link is missing in that type of coverage, which is discouraging. As audiences and as people living on this planet, when we see extreme weather events driven by climate change, it is important to have media coverage that talks about the solutions relative, or links those things together.”
Dr Antal Wozniak, senior lecturer in media, politics and society at the University of Liverpool, who was also not involved in the study, adds that his research suggests that “solutions coverage now is actually shifting more towards adaptation [as opposed to mitigation], especially when you leave the politics beat”.
The pair are working on a number of studies which look at the media’s response to climate impacts, from heatwaves to soil degradation.
Social media
While traditional media narratives about the WG3 report largely dovetailed with the solutions-orientated messages promoted by the IPCC, social media posts did not.
The study finds that 60% of the social-media posts contained themes that did not reiterate any of the IPCC’s “official” or “unofficial” messages. Around half made no mention of solutions at all.
(On top of the 12 “official” IPCC messages, the researchers also looked at dominance and prevalence of three “unofficial messages” promoted by the IPCC and UN secretary general Antonio Guterres around the report launch – for instance, a warning that it was “now or never”.)
Instead, social-media posts focused on the “dire nature of the climate threat, the need for urgent action and a sense of hopelessness”, the study notes.
Painter says “strong” divergence between social media and news media responses holds implications for efforts to build momentum behind climate action:
“If there is an increasingly fractured debate where there isn’t consensus about responses to the climate challenge, then that is important. How do you build a sort of multi-sectoral alliance to do something about climate change if that is the case?”
Equity and justice
The study notes that the concepts of equity and justice “do not seem to have been given priority” by IPCC messaging, beyond a recommendation for more finance to go to poorer nations.
The message around financial flows was among the least covered by news media: it was the third-least prevalent message in mainstream media, and the fifth least dominant.
However, the research says that journalists highlighted issues of equity and justice that were not explicitly promoted by the IPCC. For example, it finds that 22% and 14% of articles, respectively, included messaging that either richer nations or wealthier individuals “should do more”.
The study also notes discussions of equity were “lacking” on social media, with just one social-media post – from Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans – focusing on the unequal distribution of greenhouse gas emissions within and between nations.
Climate obstructionism
Another notable finding of the media analysis was the absence of a response to WG3 from what the report authors dub the “organised climate counter-movement”.
This was contrary to expectations that the analysis might confirm a trend of changing tactics of climate-sceptic groups away from outright climate denial and towards questioning climate solutions.
In fact, the paper notes that the most common source cited in critiques of climate solutions in articles was the IPCC itself.
CDR technology was the most critiqued solution, with more than a third (35%) of articles raising some form of concern.
The authors note that the UK news media was “noticeably more critical of CDR and land-based solutions than the US sample”. The US media, on the other hand, was more critical of messaging around “options being available” and the need to phase out fossil fuels.
Overall, the study finds that the IPCC was the source for 57% of all critiques of solutions in the media studied, followed by the article authors themselves (23%), IPCC-affiliated and other scientists (15%), and pro-climate action campaign groups (5%).
In contrast, the research finds “only very limited presence of organised or individual scepticism on social media” and “no presence of evidence scepticism…nor any presence of organised scepticism or individual scepticism” in articles.
The researchers argue the relative lack of a response from sceptics could be a result of the study’s small sample size and a lack of specific country-level policy recommendations for groups to critique.
Dr Max Boykoff, a professor in the University of Colorado Boulder’s environmental studies department, who was not involved in the study, says the findings chime with his research into the evolving strategies of the Heartland Institute, which found the influential US conservative thinktank was increasingly preoccupied with opposing climate action at a state-level. He tells Carbon Brief:
“There was less of a focus on the international and national scene, and more of a focus on state level, local level engagements. In baseball lingo…it’s thinking about ‘small ball’, instead of trying to hit a home run.”
Boykoff adds that the study forms “part of a larger set of efforts that take place across research communities that add value to how we understand how the world is changing around us and what we can do to influence positive change”.
The post Media response to 2022 IPCC report suggests shift to ‘solutions-based reporting’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Media response to 2022 IPCC report suggests shift to ‘solutions-based reporting’
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
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Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
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New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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