Between science and politics: Swedish newspaper reporting on forests in a changing climate

•The forest and climate change debate gained increasing prominence in the Swedish media.•The prominence of the debate correlates with events in the international climate policy arena.•The debate is dominated by scientists and politicians.•The framing of the forest-climate change nexus has resulted in abstraction and depoliticizing.

A great variety of partially conflicting perspectives exist in discussions on forests in a changing climate. These perspectives vary according to the actors affected by and involved in the discussion. The mass media has the power to attach a specific meaning to an issue that an audience may subsequently use as a frame to discuss and interpret this issue. This applies in particular to those issues that cannot directly be experienced, such as climate change. The ability to attach meaning to an issue may be seen as a form of discursive power, with different actors competing for the opportunity to present their interpretations of problems in the media. This paper aims to identify those actors with standing in the media discussion on one issue, namely forests and climate change and how they have influenced the framing of this issue in the media. Using a quantitative analysis we investigated 394 articles on forest and climate change published in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter between 1992 and 2009. The result shows an increasing discussion of the issue over the last 18 years which broadly correlates with events in the international climate policy arena. We found that scientists and politicians have a dominant standing in the media discussion and that the framing of the forest-climate change nexus has resulted in abstraction and depoliticizing of the issue.