Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics
Amongst newspapers and radioshows which relayed our study, excellent articles by brilliant journalists in France24 (Sophian Aubin), Le Temps (Pascaline Minet) and Libération (Florian Gouthière). Thanks to them.
Perga, M.-E., O. Sarrasin, J. Steinberger, S. N. Lane, and F. Butera. 2023. The climate change research that makes the front page: Is it fit to engage societal action? Global Environmental Change 80: 102675.
This paper is a collaboration of natural and social scientists from UNIL. The paper analyses the selectivity by the gatekeepers of mediatization, i.e. newsrooms, press offices of academic institutions and wealthy top-tier journals. The current mediatization model concentrates attention on research outputs from natural science. Mediatization discards the social, economic, technological aspects of climate change research. News media selectivity reduces climate change research to the role of a sentinel and whistleblower for the large-scale, observed, or end-of-century consequences of climate change for natural Earth system components.
Reviewing the social psychological mechanisms that underlie behavioral change, we argue that the consequent mediatization of #climate change research fails to breed real society engagement in actions. Selected features may move the public but not trigger public movements.
A transformative agenda for the mediatization of climate change research implies aligning newsworthiness with news effectiveness, i.e., addressing the extent to which communication is effective in presenting research that is likely to produce behavioral change.
Through the publication and mediatization of more solution-oriented, interdisciplinary outputs that take into account the public’s resistance to change, researchers and news professionals may move from being the whistleblowers of the problem to being part of the solution
Juliette Marot, a Master’s student from the ENTPE, France, works on the impact of the snow water equivalent and snow melt on the heat balance of high altitude lakes. A great but demanding field work but certainly not a problem for Juliette.
Juliette sampling snow in lake Lioson, April 2023
In a new paper led by Nico, we show that calcite precipitation, a process that is totally overlooked in carbon cycle studies, can generate as much carbon fluxes as the net ecosystem productivity for Lake Geneva. Results from a super-time resolved dataset collected over two years on LéXPLORE. The paper is in press for STOTEN, fully open access and can be found here.
Using remote sensing and machine learning, Gael could reconstruct the dynamics of whitings on Lake Geneva from the mid XXth century up to now. There is no clear trend in the annual number of whiting days over the latest 70 years. However, whitings appears now sooner, and Spring is now the whiting season, instead of summer.
Many, G., Escoffier, N., Ferrari, M., Jacquet, P., Odermatt, D., Mariethoz, G., Perolo, P., Perga, M.-E., (2022) Long-Term Spatiotemporal Variability of Whitings in Lake Geneva from Multispectral Remote Sensing and Machine Learning, Remote Sensing.