Parks Stewardship Forum

Every year approximately 300 million Americans visit at least one of the over 420 units of the US National Park System. At many parks, visitors pass through an entrance gate where a ranger provides a map and newspaper for wayfinding and essential information, while at many others a map and newspaper are freely available at visitor centers and other locations. Surveys involving 19 units of the National Park System that are designated as “national parks” suggest that approximately 37% of their visitors use the newspapers provided to them, meaning that the newspapers reach more than 30 million visitors each year in these parks alone. We propose that park newspapers are well-placed but underappreciated assets for park managers to set an agenda communicating climate change to hard-to-reach audiences. Therefore, we conducted a series of analyses, focused on 17 parks that published newspapers on a near-annual basis from 2005–2022, to examine climate change coverage in them. We found that after the National Park Service (NPS) established its Climate Change Response Program in 2010, nearly 50% of newspapers covered climate change, but from 2017–2022 that proportion plummeted to 35%. We suggest that this decline—along with similar effects evinced in internal newsletters and NPS Climate Change Tweets—rendered a missing audience that could have been persuaded by climate communication but was never reached. We estimate this missing audience at more than 470,000 visitors if 2017–2022 merely met the standard of climate change coverage set in the six years prior. Finally, we conclude by encouraging NPS to include climate change coverage in their new mobile app—otherwise they risk missing another substantial audience—and we provide examples of what that could look like.