ABSTRACT
Environmental communication is a growing field of research. Many scholars trace the beginnings of environmental communication research in the 1970s, primarily in the US and Europe, with the rise in scholarly research in how news media frame the environment and how the public understands and responds to environmental issues. As the field continues to grow, various sub-fields, clusters, and research directions also proliferate. This poses both opportunities and challenges to upcoming as well as established scholars. The opportunities include the possibility of reaching out across epistemological and methodological silos by converging in common thematic areas, something that already takes place in the context of climate change communication research. Environmental communication scholarship has matured in many ways, but the field still sometimes fails to grasp the interrelated nature of a globalized environmental reality. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
