Climate change and migration in the UK news media: How the story is told

Abstract

This research article explores the textual and visual representations of climate change induced migration within online news media in the UK. This article innovates in two-senses: it demonstrates how images interact with text to co-construct and present specific discursive packages to the general public, and also by pinning down their content more precisely to understand how they might affect policy and public understanding of the issue. Despite their differences, similar policy options emerge in relation to divergent discursive packages. The figure of climate migrant/refugee is depoliticised and divested of context and complexity, and as such it resembles the referent objects of securitising claims. This article suggests that this may work in favour of xenophobic sentiments and policies and, ultimately, deepen existing migrant and refugee integration challenges in traditional host societies.

Media coverage of climate change induced migration: Implications for meaningful media discourse

“…In particular, Farbotko (2005, 2012) and Dreher and Voyer (2015) show how media in Australia focus mainly on victimhood or potential threat to stability rather on the plight of climate migrants from the Pacific islands. Similarly, Randall (2017), Ransan-Cooper et al (2015), Hoeg and Tulloch (2019) and Sakellari (2021) assert news media in the UK and in USA seem also particularly responsive to and propagate the security threat and the victim frame. In terms of visual representations of the climate displaced in news media, Methmann (2014), through a visual discourse analysis of pictures from UK, German and US newspaper articles, demonstrates how they are depicted as racialized and passive victims of climate change.…”

“…In this framework, media understand climate migration primarily as an arena of discussions among high-ranking sources. Ransan-Cooper et al (2015), Randall (2017), Farbotko (2005) and Sakellari (2021) show how the publication of alarming climate migration stories privileges expressions of emergency and risk by senior politicians, international policy bodies, government agencies, high-profile environmentalists and organizations and scientists, brought in as independent experts. Perceptions (or contestations) of climate security drawn from affected communities have dropped off the radar.…”

Public support for climate adaptation aid and migrants: a conjoint experiment in Japan

“…Scholars have studied different aspects of climate migration such as its media portrayal (Sakellari 2021), securitization (Boas et al 2019), and its drivers (Riosmena et al 2018). While there is a well-developed literature on public support for immigrants in host countries, the extent of support for climate migrants, in particular, is not clear (Bansak et al 2016, Hermanni and Neumann 2018, Ghosn et al 2019, Abdelaaty and Steele 2020, Rich et al 2021.…”

Situating ‘migration as adaptation’ discourse and appraising its relevance to Senegal’s development sector

“…They typically portray potential environmental or climate migrants either as passive victims in need of humanitarian assistance, thereby furthering problematic 'white saviour' tropes, or as threats to European, giving new justifications to exclusionary migration and border agendas in Europe and elsewhere (Bettini, 2014;Boas et al, 2019;Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2010;Hartmann, 2010;Ransan-Cooper et al, 2015). Although these negative framings emerged in the 1990s (see Black, 2001;Castles, 2002;Saunders, 2000), they remain very common, in the press (Russo and Wodak, 2019;Sakellari, 2019) and high-profile think tank and NGO reports (e.g., EJF, 2017;IEP, 2020;Richards and Bradshaw, 2017).…”