Sustainability in Environmental Communication Research: Emerging Trends and Future Challenges

Abstract

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of how sustainability has been addressed in Environmental Communication scholarship and reflects upon key future challenges. It begins by tracing how over time sustainability communication has become a distinctive area of research in its own right. Early scholarship tended to focus on localized conflicts over environmental issues and mostly examined print media representations in Western countries. However, over recent decades, the scope has broadened and covered a greater range of issues and there has been a greater focus upon digital media. This reflects major shifts in the media landscape with the move to an increasingly networked society where there are multiple intersecting flows of information and the traditional roles of news sources and readers have become redefined. The sheer proliferation of news has encouraged a sound bite culture where images and celebrity gossip takes central stage and complex concepts such as sustainability tend to be marginalized. Much coverage of environmental issues has now migrated online. Digitalisation has encouraged a new attention economy and information overload can lead to cognitive dissonance. Moreover, the increasingly personalized information environment online tends to promote homophily and echo chambers. As the urgency of the issues has become more apparent over time there has also been an emerging interest among scholars in the ecological impact of the communication systems themselves, such as the energy used by media corporations, the film industry, and cloud computing. The chapter concludes by reflecting upon how new digital platforms both constrain and enable shifts to a more sustainable society and offers a number of suggestions as to how sustainability communication can be enhanced.