Bravo, I., Walter, S., Prasse, K., & Keuper, M. (2026). Visualizing climate change in the media: a systematic literature review, challenges, and future research. Annals of the International Communication Association. https://doi.org/10.1093/anncom/wlag011
Summary
This paper offers a systematic and scoping literature review, paired with content analysis, of scholarship on climate change visualizations in traditional and digital media from 2005 to 2024. Situated at the intersection of climate communication, media studies, and visual studies, the authors map the state of the field and argue that existing research is imbalanced: it over-represents traditional media and Western contexts while neglecting social media imagery, the Global South, and computational approaches to image analysis. The core argument is that climate imagery is central to public awareness and mobilization, yet current scholarship leaves substantial methodological and geographic blind spots that future work should confront.
Key Contributions
- A comprehensive 2005–2024 overview of the climate change visualization literature within media studies.
- Identification of methodological, geographic, and media-type gaps in the field.
- A future research agenda emphasizing social media, non-Western contexts, and computational image analysis.
- A structured framework combining systematic and scoping review methodology with content analysis.
Methods
The authors conduct a systematic literature review of publications spanning 2005–2024, complemented by a scoping review to map the breadth of the field. They then apply content analysis to the reviewed studies to characterize dimensions such as media type, geographic region, methodological approach, and thematic focus.
Findings
- Most studies examine traditional media (newspapers, television) rather than social or digital media.
- The literature is dominated by case studies of Western countries, with limited representation of the Global South.
- Computational or large-scale image analysis methods are rarely used in existing work.
- Substantive gaps remain in understanding how visualizations shape audience perception across cultural contexts.
Connections
No other papers were provided under this note’s topics, so there are no direct intellectual links to record here. The paper’s call for computational and cross-cultural image analysis positions it as a bridge between climate communication scholarship and emerging methods in automated visual analysis.