Planetary health digest
Authors: Alastair Brown, Sam Hinsley
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2019)

Climate change is a global issue, but the media coverage it receives differs between countries, including how it is framed and contextualised. How an issue is framed is influenced by the broader socioeconomic and political landscape that the media is embedded in, but how these factors apply to the framing of climate change coverage is not clear. Hong Tien Vu at the University of Kansas and colleagues investigated articles discussing climate change from 45 countries to identify the most popular frames and how national characteristics affected this framing. The most popular ways to frame climate change were in terms of international relations or its economic impacts. In wealthier nations the media were more likely to use domestic politics and scientific evidence framings. Poorer nations' coverage tended to focus on international relations and direct impacts such as rising temperatures and more frequent disasters. Understanding how climate change is framed the way it is can help with understanding the way that the public engage with it and subsequent policy responses. Murders of people defending the environment and the number of countries in which these murders took place have both increased over the past 15 years. In countries such as Brazil and the Philippines, the numbers of deaths in 2017 were sufficient to meet common definitions of an armed conflict (a minimum of 25 deaths per year). Nathalie Butt at the University of Queensland, and colleagues used a database of recorded killings of environmental defenders to investigate the drivers behind this violence, who was most at risk and why. They find that in 2017, 185 recorded killings were identified, with Indigenous peoples representing about 30% of the victims. Conflicts over resources were the core drivers of violence, with agriculture, mining, and logging the most common industries involved. Killings were more likely in countries with weak rule of law and high corruption, indicating the need for governments and private sector stakeholders to investigate their supply chains, commit to eliminating violence, and be held accountable on their performance. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompass a very ambitious and broadly-based set of objectives. Making progress on all these fronts while minimising trade-offs is a tremendously challenging task, and some goals may even have a degree of inherent incompatibility. These relationships between indicators, though much discussed, are rarely analysed in practice. To investigate the compatibility of human development and conservation efforts Judith Ament at the Zoological Society of London and colleagues explore relationships between indicators of human development and wildlife abundance—birds and mammals—in the landscape (outside of protected areas) between 1996 and 2015. In lower income country settings, they find negative relationships between human population growth and bird and mammal abundance but a positive relationship between economic growth and wildlife population trends. Encouragingly, these findings suggest that there is much potential compatibility between conservation and development agendas. However, effective policy integration is not a given and further systematic integration research and practice among sustainable development strategies and disciplines is warranted. The social cost of carbon—the net economic damage to society resulting from each additional ton of CO2 emitted—is an economic concept which exerts great influence on climate policy. Its value is computed with Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). These are essentially comprised of a set of “damage functions” used to estimate harm to society per ton of CO2 emitted and monetise it. Noah Scovronick from Emory University and co-authors select the social cost of carbon for closer inspection because the damage functions used to monetise the impacts of carbon emissions have been developed largely by economists without active participation of other specialists including health researchers. Consequently, they argue that conducting research applicable to damage functions is a unique opportunity for health professionals to directly inform climate policy. They go on to summarise the damage functions of the three leading IAM's used to calculate the social cost of carbon and describe specific study design characteristics that will help make research results applicable to future damage function application.