A Media Analysis of 50 Articles on How Gobal Environmental Change is Being Represented by Practitioners of Social Work in a Professional Domain - Assignment Help

• Introduction

Global environmental change refers to the transformation and evolution of the natural landscape due to human activity at wider scale (Ife, 1991). It has been posing environmental crisis at this present time while being well documented by many researchers until now. The environmental issues like acid rain, overpopulation, greenhouse gasses, depletion of ozone layer, topsoil erosion, food chain poisoning, melting of glaciers, fluctuating weather patterns, deforestation, oil spills, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and droughts are apparently affecting the overall communities, individuals and livelihoods (Dominelli, 2011). Scientific and academic debates have continued to present significant solutions for meeting the global environmental change challenge but undoubtedly when all of these issues combine together, they represent an ecological crisis that is difficult to be ignored (Giddens, 2009). 

Several conceptual and workable articles/journals and media reports on current global environmental crises such as global warming or climate change can be found, but still there is a lack of systematic assessment of the prime knowledge of the issue within many of the professional fields (Mason, Shires, Arwood, & Borst, 2017).  However, so far, the global environmental change has remained outside of the domain of social work discourse (Coates, 2005). Since past five decades, social workers are increasing their engagement with the environmental issues and human rights that has given rise to the new concept like environmental social work or green social work (Ramsay & Boddy, 2017). 

The social workers’ movement towards environmental engagement has gone international as the social workers have been presenting resolutions and statements related to environmental crisis like global warming and climatic change through International Federation of Social Workers (Rinkel & Powers, 2017). Other associations like American Academy of Social Work, Professional Social Work Association of Australia and Britain and Council on Social Work are also working for addressing the issues faced by the natural environment (Boetto & Bell, 2015). 

On one hand, the science of climatic change is questioned with researchers lining up with different concepts like sustainability associated with finding solutions for climatic change while on the other, media is revolving around two school of thoughts; the greens and the sceptics (Giddens, 2009). The former argue that human race is responsible for bringing the climatic change due to emission of greenhouse gases that destabilizes the worlds’ climate and damage the environment while the later argue that people play a minimal role in causing climatic changes. However, these debates have been distorted by the media assertions that claimed the data collected by Climate Change center in Britain to be fabricated (Dominelli, 2011). Darby (2011) also extended the difference between skepticism and green socialism. The article suggested that it is the role of social worker to advocate the strong link between individuals, their behavior and the environment in which they reside. Similarly, the media article by Dominelli (2010) indicated the people’s skepticism over the abuse of overall humanitarian aid concerning climate change. According to the report, social workers are primarily responsible for taking a proactive part in raising consciousness, lobbying for preventive measures, mobilizing communities and dialoguing with policy makers to bring changes in human actions that affect climate. Social workers are still responding sluggishly towards identifying the need for changing human actions that harm the environment (Dominelli, 2010).