Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elspeth Tilley, Professor of Creative Communication, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University
In today’s CO₂ news, global atmospheric carbon is at 429.46 parts per million. That’s one point lower than yesterday and 79 above the recommended planetary boundary.
That’s not something we hear routinely in news bulletins, of course. But such numeric snapshots – what’s up, what’s down and overall trends – are very familiar from daily reports of everything from stock markets to sports.
Might there be an argument for applying the same format to planetary health? Some media organisations already think so, including updates on atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in their regular coverage. But the practice remains far from mainstream.
It makes sense for news outlets to report this way, however, because humans understand trends better than abstractions or hard-to-visualise phenomena.
A brief summary of share price movements, for example, may not be the full financial story. But it does provide a regular barometer of likely changes to things that affect us – like fuel prices, mortgage payments or retirement savings.
The data is often easily available to news outlets, easy to visualise graphically, simple to slot in alongside weather and sport, and audiences are used to it.
Familiarity is the key. Stocks, weather and sports scores are “ritualised media information” – habits that shape our collective awareness. They help our brains judge an issue’s importance by how often it appears in our information environment.
Media scholars have shown how an issue’s visibility influences public opinion and government attention. Numbers crystallise this “agenda-setting” process, prompting questions about why those numbers are rising or falling, which policies influence them, and who is responsible.
In other words, what gets reported and how it’s reported matter. Societies prioritise what they notice most, and they can manage what they measure.
Connecting climate to everyday life
The fact we haven’t ritualised the reporting of atmospheric carbon readings – a key measure of global warming – isn’t because we lack data.
The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has tracked atmospheric CO₂ since 1958. The Stockholm Resilience Centre provides measures of CO₂ as well as forest cover, ocean acidification and Arctic ice.
It might be argued such numbers aren’t as relevant to people’s everyday lives as interest rates and stock markets. But that’s increasingly not the case. Environmental statistics help track changes that do and will affect us.
Links between climate change and extreme weather, rising insurance costs, transport disruptions and food prices are intricate and changeable. Daily atmospheric CO₂ reports compress the complexity of a multifaceted problem into something we can grasp more readily.
Of course, there’s a risk the very numbers that focus our minds could narrow them. Climate communication research shows repeated negative news can cause “climate fatigue”.
Read more: Climate doomism is bad storytelling – hope is much more effective at triggering action
But it doesn’t all have to be bad news. While atmospheric carbon levels are 150 parts per million above the preindustrial average, there are also good numbers to report, such as the drop in chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) since the Montreal Protocol in 1987.
Climate fatigue is caused less by too much climate news, and more by reporting that frames climate change as an irreversible catastrophe, leaving people feeling overwhelmed and powerless.
Climate communication experts recommend pairing realistic updates with news of visible action such as policy shifts, community adaptation, technological change or Indigenous stewardship.
There is now a small but growing group of “good news” outlets doing just this: Reasons to be Cheerful (founded by artist and musician David Byrne), Positive News and Fix the News report numbers related to tangible initiatives such as new hectares of forest reserve or revived populations of threatened species.
Normalising environmental awareness
To help prevent people tuning out repetitive data that changes slowly, reporting can frame the numbers in different ways – how fast they’re moving compared with past decades, the distance from specific carbon budget goals, and whether they’re moving faster or slower than predicted.
Contextual stories can connect the data to regional consequences and human stories of local climate action success. That casts the CO₂ updates as indexes of active response rather than passive observation.
For public broadcasters with mandates or charters to provide public interest journalism, the fit is obvious.
Regular CO₂ news would also balance the default reporting of economic indicators that can be perceived as prioritising markets over ecosystems. Presenting environmental numbers in the same way helps normalise attention to ecological stability.
And by realistically connecting those numbers to hot-button issues like the cost of living and healthcare, climate awareness becomes less about ideology or “climate wars” and more about the practical challenges of maintaining a habitable planet.
– ref. Share prices, sports results … CO₂ levels? The case for reporting climate stats every day – https://theconversation.com/share-prices-sports-results-co-levels-the-case-for-reporting-climate-stats-every-day-278202
