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Six Canadian and US newsrooms tied the 2023 wildfires to climate change in more than 30% of stories
Concordia researchers found more than 30% of almost 2,000 stories on Canada's 2023 wildfires in six outlets explicitly tied the fires to climate change. The data cover one record season, so whether newsrooms kept drawing the link afterwards is still untested.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The newsroom and the news-or-opinion split predicted a climate link most strongly, while language, country and tabloid or broadsheet format had smaller effects.
- The team paired automated text mining with human coding because keyword searches alone flagged phrases like "spreading like wildfire" that had no link to the fires.
- The sample ran from May to December 2023 across The Globe and Mail, Le Devoir, Le Journal de Montréal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The New York Post.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- precedent Reporters wait for a citable source before linking a disaster to climate, so the speed of future attribution studies is likely to set how early coverage of the next fire season names climate change.
- cost Measuring climate framing in the press takes human coders; anyone counting keywords alone will overstate how often coverage ties events to climate.
- constraint Because the newsroom was the strongest predictor of a climate link, six outlets are a thin base for claims about North American media as a whole.
The overall figure mostly reflects news stories. The paper reports rates for the whole sample and separately for news and opinion. Working back from those rounded percentages puts opinion pieces at roughly 10% to 14% of the stories [3]. So the overall connection rate, just over 30%, sits close to the 26% for news alone [4][6].
In both kinds of story, a mention of climate change usually came with a link to the fires. About three in four news stories that mentioned climate change also connected it to the fires, and so did more than four in five opinion pieces [1][2].
Amélie Daoust-Boisvert, an associate professor of journalism at Concordia and the study's corresponding author, had expected lower numbers [2]. "We were somewhat surprised at the level of climate mentions and connections that we observed because the levels found in previous studies tended to be quite low, usually from 2% to around 15%," she said [9]. Those earlier figures come from other studies with their own samples and coding rules. Even the news-only connection rate of 26% is above the top of that range [6][9].
The coding is careful. The team ran automated text mining alongside human coding, then read the relevant stories by hand to judge whether each one tied the fires to climate change [8]. On their own, keyword searches turned up phrases such as "spreading like wildfire" that had no connection to the fires, producing false positives [8]. The release does not say whether a story had to present climate change as a cause, or only as a contributing factor, to count as a connection [4].
Climate mentions and connections became more pronounced after World Weather Attribution, an international scientific collaboration, reported in August 2023 that climate change had more than doubled the likelihood of extreme fire weather in Quebec [11]. "Our statistical analysis shows clear trends before and after the publication of this report," Daoust-Boisvert said [12]. She attributes the change to sourcing: "Journalists always need a source before they write that climate change is involved or contributing to natural catastrophes. This report provides that." [13]
The thing this design doesn't tell you is how much of the rise was caused by the report. A before-and-after split compares two stretches of time. Anything else that changed between them, including how long the fires had been running as a story, shows up in the same comparison.
Daoust-Boisvert says the change may be the start of a long-term realignment in how the media discuss climate change [15]. "The field of extreme weather attribution has expanded over the past few years, so reporters feel more confident making that link going forward," she said [14]. I think the evidence supports a large, carefully measured jump in the worst fire season in Canada's history, when more than 15 million hectares burned [1]. It comes from six newsrooms whose own habits predicted the link better than their country or language did [7]. The sample ends in December 2023 [3].
Daoust-Boisvert also warns that as extreme weather becomes the new normal, it could lose its news value. With it could go the urgency of addressing human-caused climate change [16].
What to watch
- The same coding applied to later fire seasons in the same six outlets, to test whether the 2023 rates held.
- Whether attribution studies released while fires are still burning move the climate link earlier in a season's coverage.
- An outlet-by-outlet breakdown of connection rates, given that the newsroom predicted the link more strongly than country or language did.