Visualizing climate change in the media: a systematic literature review, challenges, and future research

Summary

This paper offers a systematic and scoping literature review, combined with content analysis, of research on climate change visualizations in traditional and digital media published between 2005 and 2024. The authors map the field to identify what kinds of visuals, media platforms, and regional contexts have been studied, and where significant gaps remain. Their central argument is that the existing literature is skewed toward traditional media and Western contexts, and that future work should expand into social media imagery, non-Western settings, and computational approaches to large-scale image analysis.

Key Contributions

• A comprehensive 2005–2024 overview of the climate change visualization literature within media studies.
• Identification of methodological, geographic, and media-type imbalances in the field.
• A future research agenda foregrounding social media, non-Western contexts, and computational image analysis.
• A structured framework integrating systematic review, scoping review, and content analysis.

Methods

The authors combine a systematic literature review with a scoping review covering publications from 2005 to 2024, and apply content analysis to the included studies to characterize their media types, geographic focus, methodological choices, and substantive themes.

Findings

• Traditional media (newspapers, television) dominate the literature, while social and digital media visuals are comparatively understudied.
• Research is heavily concentrated on Western countries, with limited coverage of the Global South.
• Computational and large-scale image analysis methods are rarely employed.
• Substantive gaps remain in understanding how climate visuals shape audience perception across cultural contexts.

Connections

No related papers have been registered under shared topics yet, so no wikilinks are warranted here. Conceptually, the paper sits at the intersection of climate communication, visual studies, and computational media analysis, and would connect naturally to future entries on social media image analysis, non-Western climate communication, and machine learning approaches to visual discourse.