Mid Sweden University

The swedish forest burst into fire when the temperature reached up to 40 degrees in july 2018. That is a short version of what the swedish media filled their articles with. In this study we are analyzing the media on local and national level on how they form their news about the forest fires that burst out in Dalarna, Härjedalen and Hälsingland during the summer 2018 and if they raise a climate relationship when they write about the fires.

There is a gap in previous research about forest fires in general; a relationship between natural disasters and climate change and that is why our research is important for future science. We are using a critical discourse analysis and a content analysis to investigate how many articles who lifts the climate relationship with the fires, the amount of articles about the fires and which concepts and actors appears in the texts on the local newspaper in the affected areas and two of the biggest national newspapers in Sweden; Dagens nyheter and Svenska dagbladet.

The result shows us that neither of the newspapers write about a climate relationship overall. The media attend to write about the temperature and how warm the summer is rather than what it depends on; the climate. However they do write about the climate in the conjunction with the fires at a few times and the national media seem to write about it more often in relation to the number of articles about the forest fires. If they do raises the relationship between climate changes and the forest fires, they still do not explain the reason and connection between those two.