Rethinking Environmental Communication: A Holistic Approach for Ecosocial Transition

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Despite decades of inquiry into media framing of ecological issues, environmental communication remains rooted in frameworks centred on risk and mediation. This limitation has hindered the development of approaches to mobilise transformative action with the required urgency, while fuelling powerlessness and eco-anxiety. This scenario is worsened by the dynamics of today’s informational ecosystem: an overabundance of often false or decontextualised content, the attention economy, excessive advertising, echo chambers, recommendation algorithms, and data extractivism. In this context, the transformative potential for socio-ecological issues is often delayed or neutralised, orchestrated by economic and media interests. Assuming that a multicausal phenomenon such as planetary collapse cannot be addressed from a single perspective —and recognising communication’s historical complicity in legitimising consumerism, unlimited development, and extractivist logics — this study adopts a holistic, critical lens on the ecosocial crisis, informed by class, race, and gender. It reflects on communication’s role in co-constructing new imaginaries of ecosocial transformation, drawing on political ecology, critical economics, Indigenous knowledge, ecofeminism, and decolonial perspectives. The study argues that the field has tended to address environmental issues narrowly through the lens of climate change, rather than as part of a broader ecosocial and systemic crisis. It problematises the role of communication and its limitations as a driver of ecosocial transformation, particularly through Ibero-American and Latin American epistemologies. Finally, it explores cases of ecosocial communication, analysing their main features, obstacles, and transformative potential.