In July of 2008, as a national broadcast correspondent, I reported on environmental conditions in Newtok, a remote community of roughly 400 Yup’ik people in Northwest Alaska. Newtok was losing forty to a hundred feet of coastline a year to erosion, and sinking because of “permafrost” that is no longer permanent, the direct result of a warming climate. Flooding threatened homes, the school, and the only supply of clean water. I chose to report on Newtok because the community was actively working on a relocation plan after voting to move to higher, more stable ground. My story compared the actions of Newtok with Kivalina, an Inupiaq community of the same size situated on a barrier island further north. Kivalina faced similar conditions and had filed suit that same year against ExxonMobil Corp. for damages caused by climate change.
In the decade since my report aired on National Public Radio, news outlets from all over the world visited Newtok, Kivalina, Shishmaref, Shaktoolik and a dozen other Alaska Native communities forced to consider relocation because of the effects of climate change. The national stories all fit the same narrative pattern. With images of houses tipping precariously off cliffs, and phrases such as “impending doom,” and “cultural extinction,” the reporting paints a picture of tragedy and hopelessness, framing community members as victims to sell the urgency of mitigation to the public. As a CNN correspondent unabashedly reported, “a trip here is like a trip into a disturbing future.”
The repetition of this narrow narrative in national and international media for more than ten years has not resulted in a groundswell of support for mitigation or adaptation. Nor has it resulted in public policy at the state or federal level. It may have even undermined the ability of these coastal communities to help themselves. According to a 2017 study by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Arctic Council, “Because government action on supporting community in general has been limited, and given the high and rising costs of relocation, it may very well be the case that people leave these communities individually and that some communities collapse before any concerted effort to relocate them en masse ever materializes. Unfortunately, governments have yet to act in many of these cases, thus delaying and increasing the magnitude of the costs and impacts. As these impacts accrue, people become less able to respond and adapt effectively.” As Enoch Adams of Kivalina sarcastically put it to me, “Well, how ‘bout I move into your house?
The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than anywhere else on the planet. NOAA’s 2017 Arctic Report Card states: “The unprecedented rate and global reach of change disproportionally affect the people of northern communities, further pressing the need to prepare for and adapt to the new Arctic.
For Americans, the “Arctic” is Alaska, a state that is among the first to experience the severe effects of a warming climate, where snow and sea ice have been declining so rapidly that coastal villages have no buffer from fall and winter storms. This is compounded by melting permafrost that has accelerated erosion and foundation problems for structures and entire communities. While it’s important for the public to see and understand this threat, it is also important for the public to see and understand how people are responding.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, conducts research on the psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence environmental attitudes and behavior. He is best known for his research indicating “Six Americas,” categories of public opinion about climate change, on a scale from “dismissive” to “alarmed.” Leiserowitz says the media focuses disproportionately on impact, and Americans are tuning out. “I think most journalists come in, they’ve already got the story written, they say I want to do a story about climate victims, climate refugees, and so I’m going to go to a place like Kivalina which is a poster child for vulnerability to climate change and I’m coming to tell that story. I’m just going to get some actualities and some nice footage of houses falling into the ocean and then I’ll go home and file my story. I don’t think they spend the time with the people in those communities to understand the stresses they are facing and moreover, they’re not really interested in thinking about ‘how do we actually address these issues?’ That’s a different kind of a story, an increasingly important and more complex story that’s not just limited to people in Kivalina. You’ve got cities like Boston and Norfolk and Miami and New Orleans all having to directly confront these fundamental challenges because it’s at their front door now too."
The underlying premise of this paper is that repetition of a narrow narrative that focuses exclusively on the impacts of climate change leaves the public with an overall sense of powerlessness. The paper focuses on five years of national media coverage of climate change in the U.S. Arctic, specifically stories about communities facing coastal erosion and relocation, to argue for journalism that provides a more representative view of the challenges posed by a warming climate. Such reporting would also include responses and innovations, and increase pressure on policymakers to act, rather than offering excuses for inaction. (...)
While it might seem contradictory to provide information about mitigation or adaptation in a story about climate change impacts, it is standard procedure in the coverage of public health. What reporter covering a flu epidemic wouldn’t think to provide information in the same story about the availability of a vaccine or how the disease was being transmitted? Lauren Feldman, of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, says unlike public health, stories about climate change seldom discuss both threat and efficacy information, or impact and action. “I think there is a model in public health. You tell a story about a crisis or a disease and you tell people what they can do to avert that crisis. A very similar approach can and should be taken with climate change. Here is a threat and here are some steps that you as an individual can take, and here is what the government is doing or and here is what industry is doing.”
In a study of climate change coverage by U.S. network television news between 2005 and 2011, Feldman found that impact and efficacy were rarely discussed together in the same broadcast, and to the extent that efficacy was discussed at all, it was framed in terms of conflict—a fight between political parties, or the impossibility or downside of a potential remedy. Feldman says, “Our most consistent finding is that including the efficacy or solution information increases people’s sense of hope, and of all the emotions that we study, fear, anger, hope—hope is the most consistent driver of intentions to engage politically, support for climate mitigation policies, energy conservation behavior; so hope is really important.”
Feldman speculates journalists fail to tell the solution part of the story because it’s not as dramatic and it smacks of advocacy. “There isn’t convergence yet around solutions. Journalists see consensus around the science now, but if you pair the science with what an individual can do about it, it looks like you are making an argument for a specific action, so it’s left out. But our empirical research indicates that people will disengage if it’s left out, if all they get is the doom and gloom message.” (...)
Alaska in the Climate Change Narrative
Over the last few decades, national and international media outlets have spent considerable time and money sending correspondents to remote communities in Alaska to witness and report on the human impacts of climate change. These are places that are not connected by road, populated primarily by indigenous people who live, in large part, a subsistence lifestyle. As anthropologists Elizabeth Marino and Peter Shweitzer noted in 2016, “with the rise in public discourse about climate change, the overwhelming desire to document the phenomenon, and the identification of Arctic residents as some of the first “victims” of climate change, rural Alaska has been besieged with unprecedented numbers of journalists, photographers, scientists, and politicians over the last 25 years. All seem eager to engage in a discussion or, even better, to get a photo of people who have first-hand experience with climate change.”
Marino and Schweitzer, who themselves were documenting the impacts of climate change in the Alaskan community of Shishmaref, reported that “while we were making dinner with a Shishmaref resident, who had already been featured in a Canadian documentary about climate change and been quoted and photographed for People and Time magazines, two television crews, one from Japan and one from Colorado, simultaneously filmed a story on climate change in his kitchen.”
The shape of the narrative begins in the early stages of the reporting process, in the very questions that are posed: How does it feel to be a climate victim? What is it like to know that you may lose your home in the middle of the night? Are you afraid of losing your culture? Just how bad are the storms? How does it feel to know there is nothing you can do to stop it?
Marino and Schweitzer document that in Shishmaref, as is the case in other Inupiaq and Yup’ik communities, residents “are hesitant to hyperbolize conditions of flooding and environmental shift. Journalists, however, are quick to use catastrophic language.”
Romy Cadiente is the relocation coordinator for Newtok. After a lengthy webinar discussion in Washington D.C., during which he detailed the problems and progress made toward relocation, the host of Wilson Center NOW asked him how he felt about climate deniers, those who are uncertain about the science. Cadiente sidestepped the loaded question and replied patiently, “There’s just a lot of information that’s already published about us, there’s no room for talk anymore. There are thirty-one villages right now in Alaska experiencing the same problem. Let’s do, guys."
Voiceless Victims
To determine the dominant narrative of national media coverage of climate change in the Arctic, we conducted an analysis of stories containing the key terms “climate change” and “arctic” in prominent print, radio, and television news outlets over a five-year period, from March 2013 to March 2018. This analysis includes the years before, during, and after President Obama’s high-profile visit to Alaska in 2015 as the U.S. assumed chairmanship of the Arctic Council.
The analysis establishes that most news stories during this time period focused on the science of climate change with no human subject. When these news stories did include people’s voices, they were overwhelmingly “experts,” including scientists, policymakers and advocates. Few included the voice of actual residents.
Of the minority subset of stories that had a human subject at the center of the narrative, it was that of an indigenous person or community. Of that subset, the individual or community was overwhelmingly framed as a victim facing environmental threat or loss. The dominant Arctic climate change story involving people focuses on coastal erosion and the prospect of relocation, a story that has been told repeatedly for more than a decade with little discussion of mitigation or adaptive responses.
The search revealed that the majority of stories are not about people at all, but rather about other aspects of the ecosystem, with sea ice, polar bears, walruses, and ocean temperatures chief among them. Of the 1,450 stories analyzed in our survey, ice is mentioned 4,559 times—an average of more than three times per story. Derivatives of “melting” are mentioned 1,178 times. Polar bears and walruses are mentioned nearly as often as Alaskans: Polar bears are mentioned 260 times and walruses are mentioned 206 times, while the word “Alaskans” comes up 289 times. Strikingly, the term “polar bears” is twice as frequent as the term “indigenous,” which only appears 118 times in the stories analyzed. Furthermore, when these indigenous communities are invoked, they rarely speak.
A selection of articles from The Washington Post illustrates the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the Post published an article about 35,000 walruses crowding the shores of Alaska, another science story about starving polar bears, a travel section article about going “nose-to-nose” with a polar bear, and a piece that appeared on page A10 with the headline, “Arctic melt has animals migrating to strange places.” While this article quotes academics and scientists from Stanford, the University of Washington, and the Smithsonian, it does not mention or quote any Arctic residents. The travel section story about polar bears had no quotes from the local people in the Inupiaq village of Kaktovik, who were described as “reticent.”
A second trend is that, of the stories that do involve people, the majority are scientists, policymakers, and advocates. “Geologist(s),” “expert(s),” “scientist(s),” or “doctor(s)” are mentioned 3,681 times in the data set, an average of nearly twice per story. Whereas, “indigenous” and related terms such as “native” are mentioned 472 times in the data set, an average of 0.25 times per story. For every twelve stories The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, ABC, or NBC produced on climate change in the Arctic in the last five years, only three mentioned the people who actually live there.
Of the stories that do involve local people or a community, most are about indigenous people facing difficulty, such as coastal erosion or inadequate funding for relocation associated with that erosion. Most of these stories frame local communities as endangered, threatened, facing losses, and incapable of responding. None of them use words such as “strong,” “capable,” or “empowered” to describe people. In fact, “strong” often describes the forces of climate change, as in “strong storms” or “strong resistance in Congress.”
Visually, a majority of the television and print stories use wide aerial shots, along with eroding beaches and cracks in the tundra, to convey the vulnerability of these communities, raising the unanswered question of why people would ever choose to live in such a place.
It is important to note that residents of Newtok and the other communities in Alaska that are most at risk live in their current locations because they were required to settle there. Yup’ik and Inupiaq people lived semi-nomadic lifestyles in the region for thousands of years. In the 1950s the government mandated that all native children receive formal education, even if it meant attending boarding schools hundreds of miles away from family. In the region, schools were built where barges could offload construction materials, on sand spits and barrier islands in river deltas prone to flooding and erosion. Because of the mandate, communities grew around the new schools. Elder Lucy Adams explains her family’s decision to paddle 70 miles to where she lives now: “In July, we take off in skin boats from Point Hope to Kivalina, because we were not in school, us children, and so the nearest one was going to be here, and that’s why we are here.” (...)
The substance of most of these stories is an emotional description of the problem. How the community is responding is an afterthought. If the story does include a discussion of responses, they are framed as obstacles—the inability of residents to get federal or state funding for relocation, the inadequacy of retaining walls that have been funded thus far, what might be lost if the community moves, the difficulty of responding locally to climate impacts. Most repeat the impossibly high relocation price tag calculated by government agencies:
“The Corps of Engineers estimates that moving would cost as much as $130 million, or more than $412,000 per resident.”
In the few more comprehensive reports about Newtok, the community that is the closest toward relocation, its new housing site, Mertarvik, is mentioned in the context of how little progress has been made, the few buildings that have been erected, and the difficulty of getting construction materials.
Finally, and notably, most reports end with a further message of impending doom, leaving the audience deep in the hole with little hope of climbing out...
by Elizabeth Arnold, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy | Read more:
Image:Diane Haeker and Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC)
[ed. See also (for example): Rising seas: 'Florida is about to be wiped off the map']
In the decade since my report aired on National Public Radio, news outlets from all over the world visited Newtok, Kivalina, Shishmaref, Shaktoolik and a dozen other Alaska Native communities forced to consider relocation because of the effects of climate change. The national stories all fit the same narrative pattern. With images of houses tipping precariously off cliffs, and phrases such as “impending doom,” and “cultural extinction,” the reporting paints a picture of tragedy and hopelessness, framing community members as victims to sell the urgency of mitigation to the public. As a CNN correspondent unabashedly reported, “a trip here is like a trip into a disturbing future.”
The repetition of this narrow narrative in national and international media for more than ten years has not resulted in a groundswell of support for mitigation or adaptation. Nor has it resulted in public policy at the state or federal level. It may have even undermined the ability of these coastal communities to help themselves. According to a 2017 study by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Arctic Council, “Because government action on supporting community in general has been limited, and given the high and rising costs of relocation, it may very well be the case that people leave these communities individually and that some communities collapse before any concerted effort to relocate them en masse ever materializes. Unfortunately, governments have yet to act in many of these cases, thus delaying and increasing the magnitude of the costs and impacts. As these impacts accrue, people become less able to respond and adapt effectively.” As Enoch Adams of Kivalina sarcastically put it to me, “Well, how ‘bout I move into your house?The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than anywhere else on the planet. NOAA’s 2017 Arctic Report Card states: “The unprecedented rate and global reach of change disproportionally affect the people of northern communities, further pressing the need to prepare for and adapt to the new Arctic.
For Americans, the “Arctic” is Alaska, a state that is among the first to experience the severe effects of a warming climate, where snow and sea ice have been declining so rapidly that coastal villages have no buffer from fall and winter storms. This is compounded by melting permafrost that has accelerated erosion and foundation problems for structures and entire communities. While it’s important for the public to see and understand this threat, it is also important for the public to see and understand how people are responding.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, conducts research on the psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence environmental attitudes and behavior. He is best known for his research indicating “Six Americas,” categories of public opinion about climate change, on a scale from “dismissive” to “alarmed.” Leiserowitz says the media focuses disproportionately on impact, and Americans are tuning out. “I think most journalists come in, they’ve already got the story written, they say I want to do a story about climate victims, climate refugees, and so I’m going to go to a place like Kivalina which is a poster child for vulnerability to climate change and I’m coming to tell that story. I’m just going to get some actualities and some nice footage of houses falling into the ocean and then I’ll go home and file my story. I don’t think they spend the time with the people in those communities to understand the stresses they are facing and moreover, they’re not really interested in thinking about ‘how do we actually address these issues?’ That’s a different kind of a story, an increasingly important and more complex story that’s not just limited to people in Kivalina. You’ve got cities like Boston and Norfolk and Miami and New Orleans all having to directly confront these fundamental challenges because it’s at their front door now too."
The underlying premise of this paper is that repetition of a narrow narrative that focuses exclusively on the impacts of climate change leaves the public with an overall sense of powerlessness. The paper focuses on five years of national media coverage of climate change in the U.S. Arctic, specifically stories about communities facing coastal erosion and relocation, to argue for journalism that provides a more representative view of the challenges posed by a warming climate. Such reporting would also include responses and innovations, and increase pressure on policymakers to act, rather than offering excuses for inaction. (...)
While it might seem contradictory to provide information about mitigation or adaptation in a story about climate change impacts, it is standard procedure in the coverage of public health. What reporter covering a flu epidemic wouldn’t think to provide information in the same story about the availability of a vaccine or how the disease was being transmitted? Lauren Feldman, of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, says unlike public health, stories about climate change seldom discuss both threat and efficacy information, or impact and action. “I think there is a model in public health. You tell a story about a crisis or a disease and you tell people what they can do to avert that crisis. A very similar approach can and should be taken with climate change. Here is a threat and here are some steps that you as an individual can take, and here is what the government is doing or and here is what industry is doing.”
In a study of climate change coverage by U.S. network television news between 2005 and 2011, Feldman found that impact and efficacy were rarely discussed together in the same broadcast, and to the extent that efficacy was discussed at all, it was framed in terms of conflict—a fight between political parties, or the impossibility or downside of a potential remedy. Feldman says, “Our most consistent finding is that including the efficacy or solution information increases people’s sense of hope, and of all the emotions that we study, fear, anger, hope—hope is the most consistent driver of intentions to engage politically, support for climate mitigation policies, energy conservation behavior; so hope is really important.”
Feldman speculates journalists fail to tell the solution part of the story because it’s not as dramatic and it smacks of advocacy. “There isn’t convergence yet around solutions. Journalists see consensus around the science now, but if you pair the science with what an individual can do about it, it looks like you are making an argument for a specific action, so it’s left out. But our empirical research indicates that people will disengage if it’s left out, if all they get is the doom and gloom message.” (...)
Alaska in the Climate Change Narrative
Over the last few decades, national and international media outlets have spent considerable time and money sending correspondents to remote communities in Alaska to witness and report on the human impacts of climate change. These are places that are not connected by road, populated primarily by indigenous people who live, in large part, a subsistence lifestyle. As anthropologists Elizabeth Marino and Peter Shweitzer noted in 2016, “with the rise in public discourse about climate change, the overwhelming desire to document the phenomenon, and the identification of Arctic residents as some of the first “victims” of climate change, rural Alaska has been besieged with unprecedented numbers of journalists, photographers, scientists, and politicians over the last 25 years. All seem eager to engage in a discussion or, even better, to get a photo of people who have first-hand experience with climate change.”
Marino and Schweitzer, who themselves were documenting the impacts of climate change in the Alaskan community of Shishmaref, reported that “while we were making dinner with a Shishmaref resident, who had already been featured in a Canadian documentary about climate change and been quoted and photographed for People and Time magazines, two television crews, one from Japan and one from Colorado, simultaneously filmed a story on climate change in his kitchen.”
The shape of the narrative begins in the early stages of the reporting process, in the very questions that are posed: How does it feel to be a climate victim? What is it like to know that you may lose your home in the middle of the night? Are you afraid of losing your culture? Just how bad are the storms? How does it feel to know there is nothing you can do to stop it?
Marino and Schweitzer document that in Shishmaref, as is the case in other Inupiaq and Yup’ik communities, residents “are hesitant to hyperbolize conditions of flooding and environmental shift. Journalists, however, are quick to use catastrophic language.”
Stripped to his shirtsleeves on a desolate polar beach, the Inupiat Eskimo hunter gazes over his Arctic world. Thousands of years ago, hungry nomads chased caribou here across a now-lost land bridge from Siberia, just 100 miles away. Many scientists believe those nomads became the first Americans. Now their descendants are about to become global-warming refugees. Their village is about to be swallowed up by the sea.
“We have no room left here,” Tony Weyiouanna, 43, said. “I have to think about my grandchildren.”Sally Russell Cox, the sole community planner for the state of Alaska, has been working with the village of Newtok since 2006. She says she rolls her eyes when she gets yet another email from a media organization asking for contact information. “I just had two different reporters today who I haven’t gotten back to yet, wanting to go out to Newtok, but it’s like, ‘have you even looked and seen how many times this story has been told?’ And it’s always, always the same story. Look, the people of Newtok are not victims. They are not refugees. We know what the problem is and we have been moving forward. That’s the story.”
Romy Cadiente is the relocation coordinator for Newtok. After a lengthy webinar discussion in Washington D.C., during which he detailed the problems and progress made toward relocation, the host of Wilson Center NOW asked him how he felt about climate deniers, those who are uncertain about the science. Cadiente sidestepped the loaded question and replied patiently, “There’s just a lot of information that’s already published about us, there’s no room for talk anymore. There are thirty-one villages right now in Alaska experiencing the same problem. Let’s do, guys."
Voiceless Victims
To determine the dominant narrative of national media coverage of climate change in the Arctic, we conducted an analysis of stories containing the key terms “climate change” and “arctic” in prominent print, radio, and television news outlets over a five-year period, from March 2013 to March 2018. This analysis includes the years before, during, and after President Obama’s high-profile visit to Alaska in 2015 as the U.S. assumed chairmanship of the Arctic Council.
The analysis establishes that most news stories during this time period focused on the science of climate change with no human subject. When these news stories did include people’s voices, they were overwhelmingly “experts,” including scientists, policymakers and advocates. Few included the voice of actual residents.
Of the minority subset of stories that had a human subject at the center of the narrative, it was that of an indigenous person or community. Of that subset, the individual or community was overwhelmingly framed as a victim facing environmental threat or loss. The dominant Arctic climate change story involving people focuses on coastal erosion and the prospect of relocation, a story that has been told repeatedly for more than a decade with little discussion of mitigation or adaptive responses.
The search revealed that the majority of stories are not about people at all, but rather about other aspects of the ecosystem, with sea ice, polar bears, walruses, and ocean temperatures chief among them. Of the 1,450 stories analyzed in our survey, ice is mentioned 4,559 times—an average of more than three times per story. Derivatives of “melting” are mentioned 1,178 times. Polar bears and walruses are mentioned nearly as often as Alaskans: Polar bears are mentioned 260 times and walruses are mentioned 206 times, while the word “Alaskans” comes up 289 times. Strikingly, the term “polar bears” is twice as frequent as the term “indigenous,” which only appears 118 times in the stories analyzed. Furthermore, when these indigenous communities are invoked, they rarely speak.
A selection of articles from The Washington Post illustrates the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the Post published an article about 35,000 walruses crowding the shores of Alaska, another science story about starving polar bears, a travel section article about going “nose-to-nose” with a polar bear, and a piece that appeared on page A10 with the headline, “Arctic melt has animals migrating to strange places.” While this article quotes academics and scientists from Stanford, the University of Washington, and the Smithsonian, it does not mention or quote any Arctic residents. The travel section story about polar bears had no quotes from the local people in the Inupiaq village of Kaktovik, who were described as “reticent.”
A second trend is that, of the stories that do involve people, the majority are scientists, policymakers, and advocates. “Geologist(s),” “expert(s),” “scientist(s),” or “doctor(s)” are mentioned 3,681 times in the data set, an average of nearly twice per story. Whereas, “indigenous” and related terms such as “native” are mentioned 472 times in the data set, an average of 0.25 times per story. For every twelve stories The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, ABC, or NBC produced on climate change in the Arctic in the last five years, only three mentioned the people who actually live there.
Of the stories that do involve local people or a community, most are about indigenous people facing difficulty, such as coastal erosion or inadequate funding for relocation associated with that erosion. Most of these stories frame local communities as endangered, threatened, facing losses, and incapable of responding. None of them use words such as “strong,” “capable,” or “empowered” to describe people. In fact, “strong” often describes the forces of climate change, as in “strong storms” or “strong resistance in Congress.”
Visually, a majority of the television and print stories use wide aerial shots, along with eroding beaches and cracks in the tundra, to convey the vulnerability of these communities, raising the unanswered question of why people would ever choose to live in such a place.
It is important to note that residents of Newtok and the other communities in Alaska that are most at risk live in their current locations because they were required to settle there. Yup’ik and Inupiaq people lived semi-nomadic lifestyles in the region for thousands of years. In the 1950s the government mandated that all native children receive formal education, even if it meant attending boarding schools hundreds of miles away from family. In the region, schools were built where barges could offload construction materials, on sand spits and barrier islands in river deltas prone to flooding and erosion. Because of the mandate, communities grew around the new schools. Elder Lucy Adams explains her family’s decision to paddle 70 miles to where she lives now: “In July, we take off in skin boats from Point Hope to Kivalina, because we were not in school, us children, and so the nearest one was going to be here, and that’s why we are here.” (...)
The substance of most of these stories is an emotional description of the problem. How the community is responding is an afterthought. If the story does include a discussion of responses, they are framed as obstacles—the inability of residents to get federal or state funding for relocation, the inadequacy of retaining walls that have been funded thus far, what might be lost if the community moves, the difficulty of responding locally to climate impacts. Most repeat the impossibly high relocation price tag calculated by government agencies:
“The Corps of Engineers estimates that moving would cost as much as $130 million, or more than $412,000 per resident.”
In the few more comprehensive reports about Newtok, the community that is the closest toward relocation, its new housing site, Mertarvik, is mentioned in the context of how little progress has been made, the few buildings that have been erected, and the difficulty of getting construction materials.
Finally, and notably, most reports end with a further message of impending doom, leaving the audience deep in the hole with little hope of climbing out...
by Elizabeth Arnold, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy | Read more:
Image:Diane Haeker and Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC)
[ed. See also (for example): Rising seas: 'Florida is about to be wiped off the map']
