Abstract

Contemporary society is characterized by the measurement and management of global risks in their different forms of economic, health, and environmental expression. These risks are (informed) socially in the interaction of discourses of the major agents and nodes of communication. The selection of the socially relevant risks, their perception and degree of acceptability depend on the communication processes, in which the information media play a determining role. This paper tackles an analysis of the discursive strategies involved in the treatment of environmental information published in four Spanish newspapers of large diffusion—El País, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, and ABC—in the time frame of the latest UN Conferences on Climate Change (COP 14-17), regarding the renewal of the Kyoto Protocol (2008 - 2012). It focuses on the processes of orientation of meaning of the complexity of environmental issues that their information treatment poses as interpretative framework, as well as on the narratives of scale through which they manage the global, national and local tensions and conflicts involved in the conformation of those risks, in the current context of economic and environmental crisis. The narratives of scale develop stories, meaningfully interrelated series of selected events, and arguments that journalists manage to make feel accountable for the changes and transformations depending on the localization of those socio-political processes.. Thus, the global discourse on climate change’s risks is specified in regional, national, or local narratives, bounding the interpretative frame of the environmental conflicts. This treatment privileges a normalized and institutionalized meaning of environmental issues, while avoiding other alternative voices that could question the way of understanding the political, economic, and social problems related to the environment.