This volume examines how a new hybrid mediascape represents and contributes to the construction of facts and knowledge in relation to science, environment, and climate controversies, providing a new, critical perspective to the bourgeoning field of science and environment communication.Arguing that science must be understood from an inclusive perspective, respecting public values and concerns alongside scientific arguments, the authors demonstrate how this will allow us to properly understand the role of science, truth, and factuality alongside the ethical, cultural, and political concerns about science raised in different publics. The chapters focus on the more controversial aspects of science and environmental communication: misinformation, public understandings of science and the environmental crises, vaccination, and the role of the hybrid mediascape in science, environment, and climate conflicts.Offering a much-needed interdisciplinary approach to understand the role of science of media in science and environment conflicts, this book will appeal to students and academics in the areas of media and communication, journalism, cultural studies, science, environment and risk communication, and digital media studies, as well as sociology and political science.

The anthology concludes with a multifaceted answer to the question: Whose truths? Questions of definition in the age of contested science. Both knowledge and counter-knowledge discourses are constructed within a context of media logic depending on the specific outlet in question. News media contribute to both constructions and contestations of institutional science positions within ongoing public negotiations about trust in science and the boundaries of scientific and technological expertise. Also within a highly polarised media environment, particularly on social media platforms, discursive constructions counter-knowledge engage in similar struggles to define facts and truth in ways that evoke wider political and populist discourses, often mimicking scientific and journalistic styles. The studies in this volume show that public discussions of science call for epistemic as well as democratic understanding of science to properly engage in discourses of climate change, technological risk, and environmental degradation.

The role of media in conflicts and dilemmas arising from the contested status of facts and truths in science, climate change, and the environment cannot be overstated. Across a multiplicity of different media outlets, from journalistic sources to digital platforms, this anthology examines various representations of factuality. This covers topics such as mis-and disinformation, conspiracy theories, and counter-knowledge representations on the one hand, over to authorities and other political actors’ use of more mainstream media outlets to either build public trust or to discuss and contest authoritative scientific discourses on the other. This introduction positions the individual studies in the chapters within a constructivist and discursive framework. Science, climate change, and environment conflicts therefore consist of a number of different discursively constructed positions competing for attention in the public media spheres; some reflect expert discourse while others draw on more popular science positions which are explicitly political. 

Science is becoming increasingly important for political as well as individual decision-making. At the same time, science, along with other knowledge institutions, like journalism, is facing growing scrutiny and questioning and terms like fake news and post-truths have become part of current public discourse. In these times, issues of public knowledge and trust in science are highly relevant. Being the fundamental platform for public discourse, media affects public opinion and defines what topics that are important and is also thought to influence public trust in institutions and actors in society. In recent decades, there has been increased interest among researchers in communicating through the media and also a growing media interest in reporting on scientific research. This increasing interrelation between science and the media has been described as a mediatisation of science. This chapter addresses issues of public communication and images of science and using Sweden as a case with a mixed-methods approach analyses media representations as well as public trust in science and research. 

The aim of this chapter is to examine the conditions for the practice of critical journalism in Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, during the Covid-19 pandemic. We focus on two aspects, one practical and one discursive. First, we focus on journalists’ access to relevant information about the pandemic, as access plays a key role in the practice of critical reporting. Second, we focus on metajournalistic discourse, understood as how public debate about ­journalism shapes the practice of journalism. We found that information access was challenged in all three countries, but in different ways. We also found elements of a metajournalistic discourse. In Denmark, this discourse expressed concern about journalism being too critical, while in Sweden and Iceland, the concern was more a lack of critical reporting. We argue that the differences found can best be explained by the different Covid-19 communication strategies in the three countries.

How issues are framed in journalism in terms of problems, solutions, and levels of responsibility is of great importance in order to engage and lead toward individual and collective action. Data journalism has been acknowledged as a practice that often features a high level of interactivity, with the potential to engage the public. In this study, we investigate the content and production of climate change reporting in Swedish public service data journalism and discuss how frames are used in this alternative form of moderated science communication. Our results indicate an unconventional merger between science communication and data journalistic practices where motivational framing is used only to some extent as a way to increase public engagement with climate change. We also found that producers focus on educating and raising awareness rather than engaging the public and that they are guided by the ideal of objectivity.

Over-fishing and eutrophication (too much nutrients) are among the most severe threats to the ecosystems of the Baltic Sea and the ecosystem services they provide. Despite the well-known fact that effective and sustainable management requires cooperation – among as well as within states – appropriate frameworks that work have not yet been constructed and successfully applied. This report summarises findings from a research project on cooperation for sustainable marine governance of the Baltic Sea carried out between 2013 and 2018. Three aspects of central relevance for the understanding of regional cooperation in environmental governance are distinguished: interests, knowledge and management. It is shown that it is not enough to design cooperative arrangements that make the group of users, stakeholders or states better off than without such an arrangement. It is furthermore required that all actors have individual interests to participate, and that free-riding on others’ contributions can be controlled. When this is not the case, effective abatement of eutrophication is not likely to be forthcoming, even though aggregated benefits from such measures are larger than expected costs.

Knowledge often play important roles in marine environmental governance, not least in relation to so-called epistemic communities, that is, groups of experts that share a common understanding of the environmental problem at hand, and how to address it. It is shown that the coherence of the epistemic group can be a crucial factor influencing its impact. In both abatement of eutrophication and management of fish stocks, these expert groups have been somewhat divided, which has limited their impact.

Modes of management can influence cooperation and outcomes in ways that can be difficult to predict. Although environmental taxes and subsidies are powerful policy instruments in contemporary governance, they must be carefully crafted to fit into exiting norms and contexts to be effective. It is shown that monetary incentives targeting farmers’ use of fertilisers tend not to be effective when they are at odds with deeply held norms on what constitute a “good farmer”.