Business Sector & Climate Concerns

• The geographical distribution of research on climate media coverage is skewed toward the West. There has been minimal work on countries in Asia or Africa that are highly vulnerable to climate change.
• Because most of the work has focused on the West, current scholarship is driven by the ideological/political aspects of climate framing. There is little knowledge of climate framing in the context of developing countries.
• Finally, the extant literature has not covered business newspapers as a category despite the significant stake of business leadership in the context of climate change mitigation and policy.

• What has been the trend in climate coverage in the Indian business media?
• What are the different climate frames used by the Indian business media?
• How have the frames evolved with time?

The study’s objective was to investigate climate change themes in business newspapers and map the temporal evolution of such compositions. Therefore, we decided to focus only on business newspapers with extensive digital archives. Therefore, we chose India’s most prominent business daily, the ‘Economic Times,’ as a single unit for the study. We crawled all the news articles from the digital archives of The Economic Times between 2008 and 2021 based on the keyword search ‘climate change’. We chose this time period because India’s domestic climate action began in 2008 with the launch of the ‘National Climate Change Plan’. Until then, India’s stance on climate change was more outward looking and driven by climate justice considerations.

Our findings suggest that while climate cooperation is a prominent topic in business media, however, it has been declining in recent years. On the other hand, the share of domestic news covering sector specific issues is increasing, mirroring India’s change in stance. A critical insight from the analysis is the increasing media attention on climate change over the last decade, even in the Indian business daily that we covered. Within the context of our study’s results, climate news has increased on a year-on-year basis and confirms the findings of other prior studies. For example, Schmidt et al. (2013) recorded that in the second half of 2000, media attention increased by a factor of 2.9 compared to the late 1990s in India. Our results show a much higher increase in coverage of climate issues, almost six times higher as compared to Schmidt et al. (2013). The higher media coverage can be considered as evidence of the growing importance of climate change in domestic affairs. Although media attention continues to increase sharply around international events such as COPs, as supported by an earlier study by Keller et al. (2020), Our findings also provide evidence an increased coverage motivated by local factors. Another notable pattern is the decline in the share of climate news driven by international factors such as COPs, giving way to a higher share of domestic news across all the themes except ‘climate cooperation’. There could be several reasons for these shifts in attention as well as issue framing. Over the last decade, India’s political stance has evolved from considering climate change as a ‘risk-responsibility’ issue to that of an equal stakeholder, thus promoting domestic sectoral changes. We, however, also have to acknowledge the strategic push for climate action at the national level that facilitated this transition. Therefore, although climate action may not have emerged as one of the most prominent themes in our research by itself, it is clearly visible as significantly impacting sectoral action in this direction. Action plans have continually been promoted as contributing to public health and energy security

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su142215214