Conflict, climate change and media: Special Issue Introduction

In January 2026, the Doomsday Clock shifted to 85 seconds to midnight, signalling that the world had entered an era of unprecedented and accelerating danger. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists identifies nuclear weapons, the misuse of information technologies, and climate change as among the most critical threats to planetary security. Taken together, these warnings expose a deeper truth: conflict, media, and climate change now form an intertwined set of forces driving global instability. Yet, despite their centrality to contemporary crises, the convergences between them remain chronically underexamined. This Special Issue confronts the urgent need to understand how these domains intersect, compound one another, and shape the conditions of insecurity that define the present moment. The editors reject the tendency to treat media, conflict, and climate change as separate arenas. Instead, they approach them as a volatile and mutually reinforcing matrix—one that structures how crises unfold, how they are communicated, and how they are politically and socially understood. Although policymakers, journalists, and scholars increasingly acknowledge that these forces are colliding, a sustained account of their entanglement is still largely absent. The contributions gathered here represent a critical first step toward theorising this convergence as a single, escalating condition of our time. The editors’ aim is not simply to “address a gap”, but to expose and challenge the architectures that maintain artificial boundaries between these fields and to insist on new ways of thinking equal to the scale of the current challenges we all face.