Fun in the Sun: Deaths Don’t Dampen Media’s “Go-To” Heat Wave Imagery

Climate Change: It’s a Beach and then you die.

BBC:

Europe’s unprecedented early summer heatwave may be responsible for hundreds of excess deaths, according to the head of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Temperature records were broken across the continent again on Sunday – including in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic – as the extreme heat continued to move east.

In a post on X, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded since 21 June “linked to high temperatures in Europe”.

Saffron O’Neill PhD, in the Academy of Social Sciences:

ne way in which many in the Global North will encounter climate news imagery is through reporting of extreme heat events. The UK, in particular, has a fascination with ‘weather talk’. So, what does heatwave news look like? Which sorts of images are used to portray the issue? And, what does this tell us about how we think about, and how we might respond to, climate change?

Together with a team of European researchers, I led a study which investigated the visual reporting of heatwaves over the summer of 2019 across four countries; the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France. We analysed news stories from 20 major online news websites, whenever they mentioned ‘climate change’ and ‘heatwave’ (and their equivalents in Dutch, German and French). We analysed the text, but also the visuals that accompanied these news items. There were three key findings.

First, we found that many visuals were positively valenced, i.e. they presented heatwaves as a fun, enjoyable activity. Heatwaves were something to anticipate and look forward to. This prominent visual framing promoted heatwaves as ‘fun in the sun’. In contrast, news articles texts were very rarely positively valenced. In all four countries, the majority of images were of people having a good time in or by water – images such as kids splashing in city fountains or families at the beach. These were the sorts of images which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a holiday brochure.

Second, another prominent visual framing was of ‘the idea of heat’. Here, the danger of heatwaves was implicit through the use of ‘dangerous’ red or orange colours and bright sunbursts saturating the image. But, people were largely absent. When people were featured, they were largely depersonalised through, for example, being silhouetted against the sun so their faces couldn’t be seen. In sum, whilst heatwaves might have been presented as a risk, people were largely absent from both the impacts of extreme heat and the solutions needed to adapt to them.

Our final finding concerns the dissonance between the perspectives offered by the texts compared to the images. In some cases, this could be stark. In all four countries, we found examples of news headlines and image captions talking about the unprecedented heat, vulnerable people and even deaths alongside these sorts of fun-in-the-sun ‘holiday snaps’.

It is worth pausing to reflect on why these sorts of visuals might be problematic.