From food shortages to endangered species, there were plenty of headline-grabbing findings in the UN’s latest big climate report. We take a look at how the UK’s newspapers covered the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest report.

The IPCC’s Working Group 2 (WG2) report on the impacts of climate change was released on March 31st. Monday’s report was the second in a series of three from the IPCC. The first report – Working Group 1’s on climate change’s physical science basis – was a big story when it was released last September, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that WG2’s report also received quite a lot of attention.

But despite being overseen by the same organisation, the two reports are very different beasts. While journalists generally focused the WG1 report’s topline finding that scientists were more certain than ever about humans influence on the climate, WG2’s broad focus led newspapers to print stories on a wide variety of issues: from flooding in the UK, to famine in parts of Africa.

Coverage

We searched the UK’s main national newspapers for coverage of the report in the two weeks leading up to its release (a more detailed methodological note can be found at the end of the blog). There were 49 articles in the mainstream press over the 15 days our search covered.

The IPCC produces updated reports every five or six years. The reports generally go through several drafts. The final week of the process involves the key authors of the reports coming together to put the final touches on a document called the Summary for Policymakers – with one being written for each of the three reports (read this for more detail about how the reports are structured). Once the IPCC signs that document off, the report can be be released.

Newspapers’ attention seems to have followed a similar pattern to when the IPCC released its first report, with most articles printed in response to the report’s launch, but a series of stories running in the week beforehand. 18 of the 49 articles were published on the day the report was released, our analysis shows.

While WG1’s findings lent themselves to articles about scientific certainty and climate change – a narrative newspapers were already broadly comfortable with – WG2 seems to have prompted deeper exploration. Over the same amount of days, we found 85 articles printed looking at the WG1 report, compared to 49 on WG2.

WG2’s findings were arguably more diverse than WG1’s, and were harder for journalists to condense into a single storyline. That meant journalists had to identify new and different storylines rather than generating multiple articles off the back of one top line, as was often the case with Working Group 1.

That seems to have led to slightly fewer – albeit more varied – articles being printed overall.

Headlines

Working Group 2’s focus on climate change’s impact on food crops, extreme weather events, and society still made for some pretty startling frontpage headlines. The report’s diverse findings gave journalists greater scope to pick their angle, it seems.

The Independent kicked things off on March 18th – two weeks before the report was released – with a front page describing the report as the “official prophecy of doom”. The article led with an attention-grabbing top line: that climate change would “displace millions of people and wipe trillions of dollars off global economy” – a theme continued in later articles.

The UK could be flooded by “climate change refugees” as droughts and heatwaves force millions of people to abandon their home countries, the Daily Mail claimed. Similarly, a later Independent article suggested climate change could mean more “war, famine and pestilence” unless policymakers start to address the risks.

A number of articles zoomed-in on the economics chapter in the report. The Times said climate change would “cost more” than previously thought, according to the final version of the WG2 report. The article alluded to last minute adjustments policymakers made to a statement about the economic damage climate change could cause. The Daily Mail also picked up on the controversy, saying the UK government had tried to “fix” the numbers to make the economic impacts look larger than an earlier draft had stated. The claim was denied by the UK’s energy and climate change secretary, Ed Davey. (We’ve also taken a look at the difficulties of calculating the costs of climate change).

Climate change’s impact on food production and security also became a key theme of the reporting. The Guardian’s front page on the day of the report’s release warned that food security could soon be a global issue as climate change hits crop yields, it said. Likewise, the Independent identified food security as one impact of climate change from which “no one in the world is immune”.

Two articles looked at what the changes in food production would mean for the UK. The Daily Telegraph said UK consumers could soon be suffering from price increases, as climate change hits developing countries from which Britain imports its food. The Guardian went for a more specific angle, outlining what climate change could mean for British consumers morning cup of coffee. “Rich western urbanites expecting to dodge the impacts of climate change should prepare for a jolt”, it said, as rising temperatures and extreme weather events drive up prices and reduce the quality of coffee beans.

Food prices weren’t the only thing in the report with implications for the UK, the newspapers said. The Independent on Sunday‘s front page on the day before the report was released focused on climate change’s impact on British woodland, outlining how drier summers and droughts could damage the UK’s forests. The following day, The Metro‘s frontpage looked at the UK’s increasing vulnerability to flooding as climate change affects the intensity of tidal surges.

In contrast to the WG1 report released last September, the WG2 report didn’t have a single easily identifiable angle. That meant journalists explored a wide range of topics, publishing stories on a variety of climate-related issues – from coffee to crops, to costs.

Big story

The WG2 report got covered by all the UK’s major newspapers, with a wide variety of climate change-related topics hitting headlines. While slightly fewer articles seemed to have been printed on WG2’s findings compared to when the WG1 report came out last year, our analysis suggests there was more depth and breadth to the reporting this time round.

The final instalment of the IPCC’s report is due to be released in just over a week, on Monday 7th April. Journalists are already sharpening their pencils, no doubt.

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Methodological note

We used an online database to search for all articles printed including the words “climate change” and at least one of the words “UN” or “IPCC” from the 18th March 2014 to 1st April 2014.

The newspapers included in the search were the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Express, Sunday Express, Sun, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Daily Mirror, and Sunday Mirror.