Media and the Climate Crisis

Abstract Recent years have seen another peak in global media attention to climate change. Driven by increasingly dire news about extreme weather, growing demands of systemic adaption and a new wave political activism, the current situation has increasingly been framed as a climate crisis. This introductory essay maps these recent developments and elaborates the conceptual potentials and limitations of the “crisis” frame. It also briefly reviews the state of the art of media research and situates the contributions of the issue into this landscape.