Speaker
Description
Biodiversity loss is a key challenge of our time, yet it competes for public attention with armed conflicts, pandemics, rising costs of living, migration, and other issues. Human cognitive capacity for processing information is inherently limited, meaning these concerns interact in complex ways, amplifying or crowding out one another in public discourse. Mass media play a pivotal role in shaping societal attention: topic prioritisation has real consequences for public awareness of and agency towards biodiversity. In my presentation, I will discuss how newspaper outlets prioritise biodiversity relative to other prevalent issues. Using automated quantitative content analysis with validated search terms, we examined the highest-circulation outlets in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Nigeria, and the United States over 2015–2025 (N=452,907). Our preliminary results show that biodiversity consistently receives the lowest media attention. Article volumes remain near zero regardless of global biodiversity milestones such as COP15. In contrast, other crises (notably COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine) generate sharp, event-driven spikes that further crowd out biodiversity in media agendas. This is in line with earlier studies on biodiversity, climate, and popular culture but reveals nuances across environmental and non-environmental challenges and diverse political-cultural contexts. The study provides large-N evidence for future research on human attention and behaviour.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
|---|---|
| FOR TALKS: Poster Presentation Option | Yes, I’m willing to present as a poster. |