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Media discourses of low carbon housing: the marginalisation of social and behavioural dimensions within the British broadsheet press

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-12-09, 14:43 authored by Catherine Cherry, Christina Hopfe, Brian MacGillivray, Nick Pidgeon
Decarbonising housing is a key UK government policy to mitigate climate change. Using discourse analysis, we assess how low carbon housing is portrayed within British broadsheet media. Three distinct storylines were identified. Dominating the discourse, Zero carbon housing promotes new-build, low carbon houses as offering high technology solutions to the climate problem. Retrofitting homes emphasises the need to reduce emissions within existing housing, tackling both climate change and rising fuel prices. A more marginal discourse, Sustainable living, frames low carbon houses as related to individual identities and ‘off-grid’ or greener lifestyles. Our analysis demonstrates that technical and economic paradigms dominate media discourse on low carbon housing, marginalising social and behavioural aspects.

Funding

This research was supported by a studentship from the Sustainable Places Research Institute at Cardiff University.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Public Understanding of Science

Volume

24

Issue

3

Pages

302 - 310

Citation

CHERRY, C. ... et al, 2015. Media discourses of low carbon housing: the marginalisation of social and behavioural dimensions within the British broadsheet press. Public Understanding of Science, 24 (3), pp. 302 - 310.

Publisher

Sage / © The Authors

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is the accepted version of an article subsequently published in the journal, Public Understanding of Science [Sage / © The Authors]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963662513512442

ISSN

0963-6625

eISSN

1361-6609

Language

  • en

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