Media Coverage and Stakeholders on Climate Change in Japan

Climate change has become a serious problem facing from global society in the 1980s and the 1990s. it is wide range subjects domain over science, economy, and politics.Although numerous attempts focused on consequences of climate change or effectiveness of policies. However, there are few reports on social acceptance of climate change. In Japan, What kind of frames is used in climate change? Which political stakeholders are mainly joined and how connected?

For this purpose, as a part of international comparative study of Comparing Climate Change Policy Network (COMPON Project), this project media analysis for articles of Japanese newspapers by using common methods among society cases of the project. In this project, we created climate change article database by searching for keywords of “Climate Change” or “Global Warming”. Then we counted articles and extracted issues and stakeholders on climate change from the database.

In conclusion, this data suggest that (1) Coverage amount is linked international agreements (like Kyoto Protocol) and political international events (G8 and COP). (2) Issues have shifted to "domestic - economy" policies in 2000's from international contributions or sciences in the 1990s. (3) The corporate sector and government come up a lot, but civil society actors were found to be less. (4) After the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, interest in climate change has fallen sharply.