Media Coverage of Climate Change in Turkey: The world versus Turkey

IPC-Mercator Policy Brief, June, 2013

Ömer Lütfi Şen *

It is sensible to expect the climate change issue to heat up in the international agenda during the second half of 2013 as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will start to release the fifth assessment report (AR5) on climate change late this year. The release of the AR5 and the possible preceding and alongside debates as well as speculations on its outcomes will likely help attract the attention of the national as well as international media. The present survey suggests that extreme weather events, especially the long lasting ones such as drought, when coincide with such activities help boost the mass media coverage of the climate change issues because in recent years there is a tendency in the mass media to readily link such events with climate change regardless of whether there is a scientifically verified relation between them or not.

* Ömer Lütfi Şen is a Mercator–IPC Fellow at Istanbul Policy Center (IPC), Sabancı University. He is currently conducting a research project entitled “A Holistic View of Climate Change Impact in Turkey.”

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