Road to Dubai: are we running out of words?

Newsletter #39

Sunset, Dubai. Photo by Omar Yehia on Unsplash

The drum roll of reports and papers that are designed to pave the way to the upcoming COP28 in Dubai have begun. If you’re not a working reporter on the climate/environment beat at a major media, consider yourself lucky.

Top of the pile is a preview of the upcoming energy outlook from the International Energy Agency (IEA), saying that fossil fuel consumption will peak before 2030 and fall into permanent decline as climate policies take effect. It projects that world demand for oil, gas and coal will begin to decline this decade.

Fatih Birol, head of the IEA, writing in the Financial Times, said that “the world is on the cusp of a historic turning point.”

Those words set the tone for the annual September pilgrimage to New York of thousands of climate elite-type people for pre-COP momentum building: the UN Climate Ambition Summit, New York Climate Week, the UN General Assembly and the SDGs Summit.

One of the pieces of doomsday coverage that stood out last week was reporting on the latest scientific update to the planetary boundaries framework. More than any other piece of climate news, this one stood out in terms of the intensity of the language used, and its ability to generate raw reactions from readers.

So, for this month’s newsletter, I decided to try a different tack. Instead of the usual highlights from the sustainability agenda, I’ll do a dive into the coverage of the boundaries framework over the years as a way to reflect on how the media has changed the way it covers planetary issues.

14 years of planetary coverage: from guard-rails to blood pressure

One of the unsung victories of science communications that is attributable to the original planetary boundaries team is the shift from covering the environment as a “beat” among others, to the notion of “planetary coverage”. Although we don’t have evidence (yet) of a planetary beat at the world’s leading media organizations, there are early signs of this trend. For example, Agence France-Presse recently named a “Future of the Planet and Science” reporter based in Bangkok.

The latest coverage of the 2023 update to the boundaries framework was high-pitch intensity scary, and it’s hard to see much scope for progression. We may indeed be running out of words for this. Nevertheless, not everyone covered it. Both the New York Times and Le Monde abstained, while others, such as Bloomberg, the Guardian, the Financial Times, went full-tilt.

What is it, and what was being updated?

In 2009, a group of researchers sought to define planetary boundaries with thresholds or tipping points in the Earth system that threaten the current state. The main idea was to come up with a set of principles, or “guard-rails”, that would reduce the risk of crossing those thresholds that could push the Earth system into a new state.

At the time, they calculated that three of the nine boundaries under consideration had been breached - climate, biodiversity loss and nitrogen use. In 2015, an update concluded that four of the nine boundaries had been transgressed, with land use as the new addition. The latest 2023 update is significant because all nine boundaries have now been quantified, including “novel entities” which represents chemicals such as plastics, DDT, PFAs. That boundary, along with freshwater, has now been breached, bringing the total of boundaries passed to six out of nine. The areas where humans have not yet exceeded boundaries under this framework are: ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading and ozone depletion.

This iconic visual gives a snapshot of that journey from 2009 to today.

Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023

Yet, one of the trickiest elements of the framework and perhaps the most confusing one for the media to capture (the diagram doesn’t help) is that each scientific step forward in this journey is more about understanding interactions among the different areas - rather than about crossing borders into some inchoate, terrifying, indescriptible zone. (although, of course, it is legitimate to worry about the latter)

Ultimately, there are 2 stories here: a science story and a media story.

The science story is more of an arc from minimum viable product (2009), through a years-long process of receiving developer (scientific) feedback to completing the finished (2023) version.

The media story is different: I’d argue that the way the media have responded to the successive updates to this framework is a story about how it has changed its approach to the planetary story. This may explain why organizations with a long track record of covering planetary science (NYT and Le Monde) decided to pass this time - no new scientific insight. Whereas others, such as Bloomberg, chose to “big” up this story into something that could weigh in on the current fossil capture of the climate action space. (COP28 will be primetime for the new sport of conflating “carbon dioxide removal” with “climate action”.)

The “sick patient” language really works compared to “safe operating space” or “guard-rails”

Everyone knows what it means to fail your annual health check. It means change, usually unpleasant. Those changes may or not bring you back to full health and well-being.

Here is the Bloomberg headline: “Climate Change Sends Most Indicators of Earth’s Health into Danger Zone”. The sick patient metaphor is used to compare the update to a “full fitness examination on Earth.”

Here’s a quote from one of the lead authors: “We can think of Earth as a human body, and the planetary boundaries as blood pressure. Over 120/80 does not indicate a certain heart attack but it does raise the risk and, therefore, we work to reduce blood pressure.”

Compare this with the 2010 language where Johan Rockstrom demonstrates in his TED talk the impact of human pressure on the planet by sitting down on an inflatable globe. Once you’ve seen this, it gets harder to layer on the boundaries as blood pressure thing.

Keep ramping the language to the max - “global boiling” is another 2023 example

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has top-notch speechwriters, and he has coined a few phrases which are go-down-in-history memorable - such as “half of humanity is in the danger zone” & “atlas of suffering” for the IPCC’s report on adaptation last year. This year he coined “global boiling”, which seemed like an end-of-career choice given that there’s nowhere to go after you hit the boiling point. I didn’t love global boiling, but it sure worked with the media.

The way we talk about planetary boundaries has come a long way. Back in 2012, the US delegation at the Rio + 20 Earth Summit made sure to strike all references to this term from the outcome document, “The Future We Want”. This was standard practice for them vis a vis any term that was seen as not well known, or not sufficiently researched. In fact, they fought an earlier, similar, crusade ahead of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to make sure its official name was “UN Conference on Environment and Development”, and not “sustainable development”.

Where to go from here?

Victory comes at a cost, and the price paid for the media’s full embrace of the planetary boundaries language and framing is, possibly, a departure from the more thoughtful scientific coverage of such material in the past. This is no-one’s fault, but rather an outcome of the increasing polarization of politics and the way short video has undermined our attention span.

If every major global media creates a planetary beat, and fills it with reporters who thrive on covering complex issues, and the beat is empowered to be at the same level as the political beat, that would be something to celebrate.

But I do worry that we will run out of words to convey increasing urgency and alarm.

I’d love to hear from anyone who read the coverage of the boundaries update, and what you thought. Or if you didn’t even notice it, and think it’s irrelevant.

Please hit reply with your thoughts, and feedback.

Thanks for reading, and see you next month!