2025/01/31 by Alex Fernández, Daniel Rodrigo Cano · 3 voices
Social Sciences · #Communication and COVID-19 Impact
paper · pdf · doi:10.21134/9n84p259
The characteristics of graphic humour make it ideal for raising awareness and mobilising in the fight against climate change. This work aims to contribute in this direction by investigating the use of graphic humour to communicate climate change stories. Thus, it quantitatively and qualitatively analyses the main results of cartoons in Spanish (n=100) and English (n=100) published in the media, blogs, websites and social networks that Google, the most popular search engine among citizens, offers in its specialised image search engine. It concludes that graphic humour uses all the stories of climate change communication, demonstrating its diversity of registers to reach public opinion, that one of the main stories is the criticism of denialism, and that there are notable differences in the use of the stories and between the cartoons in both languages. It is proposed that cartoonists not limit themselves to pessimistic messages that may fail in raising awareness and climate mobilisation, and incorporate hope and solutions.