Increased Attribution of Climate Change in the Press Coverage of the 2023 Canadian Wildfires

Extreme weather events, as manifestations of anthropogenic climate change, offer the media an opportunity to highlight its impacts. In this study, we use the 2023 historic Canadian wildfire season as a case study into how a sample of francophone and anglophone Canadian and U.S. news outlets covered the events in connection to climate change, employing a hybrid quantitative approach combining computational text-mining and human coding. We found that close to 40% of the 1958 stories collected between May and December 2023 mention climate change, a higher rate than reported in previous studies on extreme weather treatment by the media. Moreover, over 30% make an explicit connection between the wildfires and climate change. The likelihood of climate change mentions and connections is mostly driven by individual newsroom and by story type (news or opinion), with media format (tabloid or legacy), country or language playing a smaller role. The publication of an attribution study mid-season also drove the climate mentions and connections up for a sustained amount of time. Our findings suggest a shift in media practices, with news outlets becoming less hesitant in discussing climate change in the context of extreme weather events.