Public Communication of Climate and Justice: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The intersection of public communication, climate change, and justice constitutes a nascent but growing interdisciplinary field of vital importance as climate change, driven largely by consumption patterns in high‐income counties, disproportionately affects communities with limited adaptive capacity, raising profound justice concerns. This scoping review delves into the emerging domain of public communication regarding climate and justice and seeks to provide a comprehensive overview that may help guide future research. It maps the landscape of existing peer‐reviewed journal scholarship, identifying trends and gaps across disciplines such as communication, energy politics, and urban planning. Following a birds‐eye quantitative analysis of English peer‐reviewed journal articles in the field ( N = 250 studies), six thematic areas are scrutinized in‐depth: (1) activism and protest, (2) journalism and news media, (3) international negotiations, national policy, and local engagement, (4) art and cultural production, (5) climate obstruction and delay, and (6) communication effects on attitudes and behaviors. The review reveals, inter alia, a predominance of research originating from, and case studies focused on high‐income countries, a strong reliance on qualitative methods, and a tendency to conceive of justice in terms of distributive rather than procedural or representational questions. In the authors' view, the review indicates a need for comparative research, quantitative studies, and a broader inclusion of perspectives from regions disproportionately affected by climate change—particularly from low‐ and middle‐income countries. The authors call for a concerted effort to bridge the gap between activism and communication by emphasizing the critical role of justice‐oriented communication in fostering a fair and rapid transition to a sustainable future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.121 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.025 | 0.023 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".