‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown | Saffron O’Neill | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/14/sun-photos-climate-breakdownOur new research, led by the University of Exeter, highlights a distinct problem with how the European media visually represents news of extreme heat. We examined media coverage from the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany during the summer of 2019. Importantly, we only included news stories that mentioned both the keywords “heatwave” and “climate change”, reasoning that if we were to see responsible and accurate reporting of heatwave risks, it would be in coverage that at least alluded to the increasing risk of heatwaves becoming longer, more frequent and more intense under climate breakdown.
We found two distinct themes in visual coverage. The first used images of “fun in the sun” that depicted heatwaves as something enjoyable. In all four countries, the majority of these images showed people having a good time in or by water. This was particularly prominent in the UK, perhaps saying something about how British culture narrates the experience of very hot weather in our historically mild climate.
The second theme we found was “the idea of heat”, depicted through red and orange colours, which are (in western cultures) commonly associated with heat or danger. People were largely absent from this visual discourse in photos such as generic stock photographs of thermometers against a blindingly hot sun. When people were pictured, they were depersonalised by silhouetting them against the sun so their faces were not visible.
Across all four countries, there was a mismatch between the text of the articles and the accompanying visuals. While the headlines and image captions proclaimed news of unprecedented heat, vulnerable people and even deaths, the photos featured were those “fun in the sun” holiday snaps.
This is problematic in two ways. First, by displacing concerns of vulnerability, it marginalises the experiences of those vulnerable to heatwaves: older people, young children and babies, people with pre-existing health conditions, and people living in poor-quality housing are all more at risk from extreme heat.
Second, there is a difference between northern Europeans looking forward to a “normal” period of sunny, settled, summer weather (I know – I wish for this after a long and often drearily rainy Devon winter) and articles which may, to a greater or lesser extent, appear to be welcoming the prospect of a much hotter, climate-changed future. Whether extreme heat events are visualised through photos of people on beaches or are excluding people completely, we are missing an opportunity to imagine a more resilient future.