ECOLA_Environmental Communication in Latin America: Innovations and Challenges of Climate Reporting

The role of media is key to shape public understanding of humans' impact on the planet, raising awareness of environmental issues and motivating social and policy actions to tackle them. Within the field of environmental communication, and more specifically climate change communication, news media coverage has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention. However, most of the studies that delve into the practices, effects, impediments, and successful strategies to frame content about the environment are centered on the Global North. In contrast, this research (acronym ECOLA) is focused on Latin America, home to one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet and a region particularly susceptible to the impact of climate change. Amid the widespread threat of misinformation in countries such as Brazil, this study moves beyond traditional news media enquiries to investigate how a broader range of communicators across different media and national contexts, such as reporters, photojournalists, documentary filmmakers and community leaders, are disseminating mediated discourses about the environment that can push for solutions. Understanding the debates raised by a diverse group o regional media actors is essential to build connections between global researchers, media producers and other stakeholders interested in strategic communication to facilitate society's engagement with ecological problems. Environmental communication is a growing field of research that bridges natural sciences and the humanities, crossing different disciplines such as media, journalism, cultural, social movements and urban studies. ECOLA aims to expand the interdisciplinary knowledge of the field by critically analysing the landscape and the dynamics of environmental communication in an underrepresented region and beyond large media corporations.
The main research questions address the type of news stories that Latin American producers are disseminating online to inform society about ecological crises beyond "breaking news"; the extent to which they include the voices of those who are among the most affected and the main challenges of environmental coverage in a regional context of economic and political instability. The project will use semi-structured interviews with journalists and other environmental communicators across Latin America, to establish their views on their innovative practices, their perceived role, the responses from the audiences and the challenges to inform society about climate change. Their accounts will help to identify unifying aspects of their practices and to shed light on transnation obstacles such as anti-enviromental discourses driven by misinformation, political polarisation and/or economic pressure. Interviews will be combined with participant observation in Brazil and analysis of the coverage of climate change, using seminal case studies.