Dr Nerina Boursinou, Ms Anatoli Rontogianni, Dr Christos Kostopoulos

Our interdisciplinary collaborative research project (2023-2024), Between Borders and Headlines: A Critical Analysis of the Greek Press’s Narratives on Climate Migrants, aims to understand how climate – induced migration and climate migrants are represented and framed, and the results of this framing on the cultivation of democratic debates in the Greek public sphere, and the potential impact on (prospective) migrants’ rights and mobilities, by capturing and analysing this phenomenon in widely circulated newspapers.

Background of the research aka Why Greece, why climate migration, why now?

Anthropogenic climate change is an emergent threat for humanity.  Ιt is caused by the all and highest concentration of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, such as burning fossil fuel and deforestation. Climate change holds various consequences, the most obvious being extreme weather events which in turn causes a reconfiguration of living conditions on our planet. Οften, that leads to the forced movement of populations towards safer and more sustainable environments. This project approaches climate- induced migration, as a complex issue with social, economic, and political dimensions.

Greece constitutes a prominent case study as it has been one of the main gateways in the Mediterranean for those who wish to move towards the European core following the Balkan routes as well as a direct connection between Europe and countries of the Global South, already suffering from the effects of the climate crisis.

A closer look to the ways in which climate migration, has been reported on the Greek media, will yield limited results. This happens because climate migration has -for long- been considered as a topic that held no commercial value and therefore was flying under the radar. Οn the contrary, climate change and subsequently the climate crisis is a topic that is regularly covered by Greek media in a context of generalisation or citing the environmental results of this urgent situation. The last decade Greece is a pioneer in the application of rules with the aim of achieving the climate targets set by the European Union. 

The relevant academic literature on the coverage of climate migration, suggests a growing interest in the topic, on the European territory and the UK, while Greece has so far remained an under-represented country. Therefore, this project aims to contribute to the developing body of research, by bringing timely insights from the Greek case study as a way to trace the differences and points of convergence in countries of arrival, transit and destination.

Methodology  

We are using qualitative frame analysis (Van Gorp, 2007) on a sample of four newspapers, to dissect the political and cultural meaning attached to the frames while hoping to bring forward the definitions of the problem provided in the press, alongside the causes, solutions, and moral evaluations of climate induced migration and the actors involved. 

The timeframe of the research is between November 2016 and July 2023: we have selected these dates as November 2016 marks the date when the Paris agreement – a legally binding international treaty on climate change, adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015, came into force. Similarly, the

summer of 2023 is a natural time limit after of which great environmental events happened in Eastern Mediterranean and in our field of interest, Greece region.

We are examining four broadsheet newspapers, namely: EFSYN (Editors’ journal, a cooperative media), TA NEA (translation ‘The News), To VIMA (The Stand) and Kathimerini (The Daily).  All newspapers, in sequence, cover a wide spectrum of the center, starting from the center-left to the center-right political spectrum (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1: Sample of newspapers and their position on the political spectrum.

This ongoing, independent project runs from July 2023 to September 2024 and is currently at the data collection stage. We hope to be able to share preliminary data in due course, while we are also working towards scheduling dissemination activities with collaborating research organisations in Greece and abroad.

If you would like to be kept up to date with the progress of this research, please reach out to us (m.boursinou@surrey.ac.uk)!