Stop visualizing heatwaves with sunbathers and beachgoers!
On the dangers of media portraying heatwaves as fun days in the sun.
Welcome back to Climate Psyched, the newsletter where we explore all things psychological, behavioral and emotional related to the climate and ecosystem crises.
Summer is here, and I’m mixing time off with days of writing on our upcoming book about climate psychology and how to harness collective behavior, eco emotions and navigating these times of multiple, intertwined crises. It’s so much fun and it’s so hard to write a book! Especially hard when the world constantly keeps happening at such a speed that it seems impossible to keep up. One thing we’re writing about is the importance of allowing oneself time to pause and recover, even though there’s endless of work in the world that needs to be done. We’re in this for the long run, and that requires regular rest, however hard it can be to allow oneself.
Summer in Europe nowadays also means time for extreme heat. And with extreme heat comes: media imagery of happy people sunbathing and hanging out at the beach. So that’s what’s this month’s post is about: the dangers of depicting heatwaves as having fun in the sun.
Situation
There’s currently an intense heatwave holding parts of southern Europe in its grip. On Saturday a new heat record for June was set in Spain, with temperatures hitting 46C. Heatwaves have already, and will continue to increase due to man-made climate change. Impacts of heatwaves include heat exhaustion and heat stroke, which can cause faintness and swelling in the lower ribs, headaches and weakness. Heat is more dangerous for people with chronic diseases, elderly people and children. Heatwaves are dangerous, they’re no walk in the park, and they’re definitely not a fun day in the sun.
Yet, media often visually portrays heatwaves with images of people sunbathing, hanging out at the beach and eating ice cream. This was the picture Swedish public service used as imagery for an article about the Swedish foreign ministry warning people who are in Spain, due to these extreme temperatures:
Far from a first, depicting heatwaves as having fun in the sun is both common and dangerous for several reasons.
Explanation
In a content analysis of media images from the 2021 Heat Dome in Canada, a research group found that out of 845 analyzed images, only 16% implied that heat, in fact, is something dangerous. Out of those 16% only 40% depicted people and 46% implied human suffering.
Another research group, analyzing images from media coverage of the 2019 heatwaves in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK similarly found that the most prevalent type of image, across all four countries, were photos of people having fun in or by water. What the researchers also found were that when images in fact did depict the danger of heatwaves, people were largely absent - as if the danger is separate from people.
An Australian study similarly saw that health-related warnings about heat was competing with imagery of beachgoers and people enjoying themselves, which potentially could attenuate the risk perception of heatwaves.
How climate change and extreme weather events are visually portrayed and communicated will affect people’s risk perception, and what they associate climate change with.
Affective dilemmas and misperception of the risks with heatwaves
Sun and warm weather is often a tricky subject, since many people associate warm, sunny weather with something nice. In their article about normativity of climate emotions, Kirsti Jylhä and Julia Mosquera identify a number of so called climate related affective dilemmas that people commonly encounter. One of them concerns how to feel about warm sunny weather. They resonate around these dilemmas in the following quote:
In the face of increasingly warmer summer days, there are prima facie reasons to feel anxiety, but also joy. On one hand, there are reasons to feel anxiety about warmer summers because these are goods that are morally tinted by their causal source, namely humanly caused climate change with potentially devastating consequences for life on the planet. There are culture specific norms that regulate the display of emotions and in some social and cultural contexts it seems to have become an implicit social norm not to express joy regarding exceptionally warmer summers; if joy is expressed, it is expected to be usually accompanied by a reference to how ‘weird’ or ‘scary’ this warmth feels. On the other hand, there are also reasons to feel joy during warmer summer days given that warmer weather is pleasurable – a preference that is shown to be extended among most people.
Although conflicting, the association between sun, warm weather and pleasant emotions is strong amongst many people, and visualizing heatwaves with pleasant images of people at the beach can generalize this association to include heatwaves. But heatwaves aren’t nice weather. Heatwaves are deadly weather. Depicting heatwaves in a realistic way is important to adjust people’s risk perception to match the actual risks.
In a nationally representative survey of UK residents, conducted in summer 2023, researchers found some contradicting results: although heat was viewed as life-threatening and the respondents acknowledged the increasing risks of heatwaves to other people, few saw themselves as being at risk. A majority of the respondents perceived their local climate as hotter, with hot days becoming more frequent and experiencing discomfort during these days. But even though 37% of the respondents stated that they had personally experienced health-related impacts of heat, only 19% responded that they thought it was very or extremely likely that their own health would be impacted by heat events in the coming five years. This indicates that people’s risk perception of heatwaves is inaccurate and that they underestimate the risks of heatwaves to their own health. Both this study, and a scoping review of how people perceive heat, have seen that vulnerable groups are more concerned about heatwaves. These vulnerable groups are rarely represented in the media imagery of heatwaves.
How heatwaves are portrayed affect people’s coping behaviors
When deciding how to act in certain situations and circumstances, people generally look for social information and cues by seeing how others act. What we see others do is often a strong influencer on our own behavior, usually stronger than, say, a leaflet with information coming from the local authorities. If heatwaves keep being portrayed by happy, sunbathing people, there’s a risk that people's perception of heatwaves make them underestimate the dangers and thus become less prepared. Images matter in how people perceive an issue, but also in how responses to climate change is shaped. Luckily there are some guidelines to follow to improve media imagery of extreme weather events like heatwaves.
Action
The NGO Climate Resilience for all has developed these 10 guidelines for portraying extreme heat as a serious threat:
Image of the 10 guidelines for effective extreme heat visuals, taken from Climate Resilience For All The Climate Outreach project Climate Visuals use an evidence based approach and 7 core principles for climate change communication, which is a good guide to use (you can read more about the principles here):
We also need to call out media outlets when heatwaves are depicted as fun beach days. Demand better and more realistic imagery.
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Another good post Frida, it is odd how we treat a health risk (including sunbathing) in this way. Thanks for writing a thoughtful piece and excited to hear about the book!
love the very spot on titles!