Getting the Picture: Changing the Heatwave Visual Discourse in the News Media

Visual images shape (and limit) our imagination of how we might live in a climate-changed world. For climate change, how an issue is represented in the news media (including TV, newspapers and social media) is central to peoples’ perceptions and behavioural responses. In July 2022, temperatures in the UK reached 40°C, the Met Office issued its first red ‘extreme heat’ warning and the Government declared a national emergency. Under climate change, the UK is increasingly experiencing extreme heat; but households, businesses and public services are poorly prepared for its impacts. Extreme heat carries substantial risks to human health and exacerbates existing inequalities in society. However, in the UK (as with much of Europe, North America and Australia) a heatwave often results in ‘fun in the sun’ images featuring in the news: photography and videography of children splashing in city fountains, bright umbrellas at the beach, high days and holidays. Rarely do visuals show the adverse impacts of extreme heat on peoples’ health, agriculture or infrastructure. This visual framing of extreme heat acts to hide vulnerable people and places from view; and excludes opportunities to imagine a more resilient future. This project builds on interdisciplinary literatures from geography, visual politics, media and journalism, and computer science to unsettle this narrow visual discourse of extreme heat. These literatures indicate that substantial barriers exist to reshaping the visual discourse of climate change in the news media. First, image agencies and news organisations are actors particularly powerful in influencing and shaping the visual climate discourse. Second, information architectures (or the ways in which information is organised and presented – such as how images are tagged to enable searches in an image collection) fundamentally influence how visuals flow through or encounter friction within the globalised media ecosystem. This project therefore offers an innovative examination of heatwave images at the sites of image production, the image itself, image audiencing and circulation by synthesising insights across the social science-computational science nexus. It aims to explore, understand, critique and reimagine the visual images used to represent heatwaves in the news media. This project brings together a transdisciplinary team of academics, experienced in working together at the nexus of the social and computational sciences, with practitioners. It has been co-produced with BAFTA-award winning filmmakers Open Planet, and climate communications specialists Climate Visuals at Climate Outreach. Project partners are the global image agency Getty Images and Press Gazette-award winning specialist climate journalism organisation Carbon Brief; and extreme heat and climate adaptation experts at the WHO-WMO Global Heat Health Information Network (GHHIN), the London Climate Ready Partnership (LCRP) and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). The Expert Advisory Board includes specialists bringing expertise from academia, media, health and nature sectors. This project will investigate the barriers and opportunities for visually portraying heatwaves in more equitable and representative ways, work with vulnerable communities to open a more representative and equitable visual discourse of extreme heat, and test the efficacy of these new heatwave visuals to understand engagement by climate decision makers, journalists and public audiences. It will deliver resources for the media industry, including the Heatwave Collection of free-to-access videography and photography, media cheat-sheets and a report. This co-produced research project aims to transform the visual discourse of extreme heat in the news media.