(Not) Covering Climate Risks: A Multimodal News Framing Analysis of Soil Health Reporting in the UK Press

ABSTRACT Risks to soil health from increased flooding and drought due to climate change are a priority risk area for the UK government. Our analysis of newspaper coverage of this issue reveals very little attention to it in the two years following the release of the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2022 . We conduct a qualitative multimodal framing analysis of a population of 42 news reports and their 117 accompanying images. We identify two major issue frames that include soil health as either a remedy or cause: habitat/biodiversity loss and food insecurity. Both focus on adaptation measures, mostly in industrial agriculture and community‐ or individual‐level gardening. Climate change mitigation through carbon sequestration is a secondary aspect that cuts across both issue frames. Policymakers are largely absent, both in writing and imagery. Visuals are often generic and lack representations of loss. Implications for publicly communicating the climate risk of soil degradation are discussed.