Press coverage of climate change issues in Nigeria and implications for public participation opportunities

How are environmental problems and climate change issues covered and framed by Nigerian newspapers? This content analysis of systematically sampled, 438 issues from 4380 issues of four selected dailies between 2007 and 2009, reveals dominance of climate politics/economics issues (61.2 per cent), foreign sourcing of reports (63.4 per cent), straight news formatting of reports (83.6 per cent) and framing in terms of mitigation (55.2 per cent). The study concludes that the coverage and framing constrain opportunities for popular participation in climate change discourse. To improve the situation, the study argues that Nigerian newspapers should broaden the scope of climate change coverage and framing, widen local sourcing of reports, diversify the formats of reporting and frame the issues more in the terms of adaptation to increase the involvement of Nigerian people in climate change discourse.