ABSTRACT
The UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) is not only one of the youngest institutions in the UN family. It is also one of its less visible institutions. At the same time, UNEP seeks to speak for the environment and sees its core mission to create environmental awareness on a global scale. The environmental mass media might have been UNEP’s perfect ally. The link between them, however, was not a natural one. On the one hand, institutionally as well as programmatically, UNEP seemed rather unfit for print. On the other hand, the strategy to employ source-instigated news or advocacy journalism to foster environmental awareness played only a minor role for UNEP. UNEP’s goal were long-term and profound changes in the world’s population’ environmental awareness. While the mass media were a tool to instigate short-term attention through providing apocalyptic-sounding news about environmental catastrophes, UNEP considered information to be their tool to instigate long-term changes in the human mind and humanity’s understanding of the environment. Information and not news was the pathway to environmental wisdom. This chapter uncovers UNEP’s information strategy for creating environmental awareness between 1972 and 1993—the conferences of Stockholm and Rio—while teasing out the institution’s relationship with the media.
