Yuan Zheng

Forests in the Changing Climate: a Media Discourse Analysis of Scientific Communication Yuan Zheng

Scientists emerge as media stars accompanied by a newly-formed intricate bound of science, policy and media where the authority of science is greatly challenged. This popular boom particularly holds true for global environmental issues, which bear the nature of complexity and uncertainty, thus subjective to continuous controversies carried over from scientific domain to the public sphere often amplified by extensive media coverage. Climate change is unequivocally the most distinguished illustration, aggravated by the alarming deforestation rate in recent years. The severity of the issue has inspired the work to investigate how science is communicated via media discourse concerning forests in the changing climate, which has seldom been touched upon in previous literature. This book, therefore, firstly analyzes frames of scientists regarding forest issues in climate change using coding method and then provides a depiction of their characteristics for media prominence. The analysis is highly interdisciplinary and is especially helpful to professionals in the fields of forests, climate change as well as communications.