Soil health largely absent from UK media reporting on climate change, study finds
A new analysis of coverage in over 100 UK media outlets between 2022 and 2024 has revealed that soil health and degradation were rarely discussed in reporting on climate change, despite being identified as one of eight priority risk areas in January 2022’s UK Climate Change Risk Assessment. This, the authors say, could have negative consequences for the public’s understanding of the risks posed by climate change.
The research undertaken by Dr Antal Wozniak and Dr Jill Hopke, and published this week in the Royal Geographical Society’s Geographical Journal, found just 42 articles on climate change, flooding or drought in the UK that mentioned soil health over the two-year period following the publication of the third Climate Change Risk Assessment in 2022.
Many of the UK’s most-read newspapers, including The Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, and the Evening Standard, did not cover the issue at all.
Where soil health and climate change were covered in tandem, 40% of articles focused on impacts to biodiversity, while 45% mentioned associated risks to agriculture and food security.
However, the authors say that even this coverage provided an incomplete picture of the impact the changing climate, including extreme weather, flooding and drought, has had on soil health in the UK.
The subsequent consequences of soil degradation, including increased risk of flooding and the loss of natural carbon sinks, were also largely absent.
Visual and textual analysis of the 42 articles that did cover soil health and climate change in the UK revealed a distinctly apolitical framing of the issue, despite the well-documented effects of land use, energy, and environmental policy on soil health.
In the articles identified in the study, quotes from elected officials or other policymakers were rare and pictures of them were completely absent. Just one article featured any sort of public protest. Instead, commentary was largely drawn from scientists, businesses and trade associations, and local residents in affected areas, a one-sided framing which the authors say could obscure potential policy solutions.
Additionally, these articles largely focused on isolated, specific instances of soil degradation, zooming in on threats to local landscapes, ecosystems and economies rather than discussing larger risks to soil health nationwide.
The authors found that individual and community-led adaptations to climate-related soil degradation were prioritised in coverage over government-led strategies to address the root causes of climate change.
The authors warn that failing to report on the implications of soil degradation in coverage of climate-related stories, such as extreme weather events, could negatively affect the wider public’s climate risk awareness and weaken their political agency to address the root causes of climate change.
The absence of detailed context for climate risks was illustrated by coverage during the damaging winter storms in 2023-2024, when flooding and winds led to severe crop and livestock losses and soil erosion in the UK and Ireland.
The authors found that no articles about these storms in the sampled newspapers mentioned any of the study’s seven keywords related to soil health, degradation, or erosion, despite the major risks to soil health posed by such events and the downstream environmental effects of extreme weather-induced soil degradation.
Dr Antal Wozniak said:
“When news outlets fail to provide a full picture of how climate change is impacting their audience’s environment, the public’s ability to organise and confront these effects, both in their personal practices and at the ballot box, is negatively impacted.
“Unfortunately, the contraction of newsroom staff, specialist reporters and operating budgets over the past decades seems to have hampered news outlets’ ability to properly account for and contextualise the risks posed by climate change.”
Dr Jill Hopke said:
“Soil health is vital to food security, natural carbon storage, and biodiversity, as well as to agriculture and the wider economy, but if you’re reading major British newspapers, you’re unlikely to know that it has come under serious threat as the climate changes.
“It’s critical that media outlets offer a more holistic and long-term view of the effects of climate change so the public in the UK, and internationally, can better understand what’s at stake.”
This study was undertaken by Dr Antal Wozniak of the University of Liverpool and Dr Jill Hopke of DePaul University, Chicago.
Their full article in The Geographical Journal is available on Wiley.