University of Exeter

Associate Professor in Geography

Saffron O’Neill is Associate Professor in Geography, University of Exeter, UK. Her research focuses on climate change communication and public engagement, with a specialism in visual climate communication. She has held both Leverhulme Trust and ESRC Fellowships on this topic. She supervises an inter- and transdisciplinary group of PhD students working on climate communication and public engagement with climate change. She is Co-Director of the ESRC’s Advancing Capacity for Climate and Environment Social Science (ACCESS) programme. ACCESS aims to foster new ideas and solutions based on social science evidence, data and expertise to support policy and decision makers across the UK on net zero and other sustainability goals.

Saffron is particularly interested in the role of the media sector in visually communicating heatwave risk. Her lead-authored paper ‘Visual portrayals of fun in the sun misrepresent heatwave risks in European newspapers’ showed that these ‘fun in the sun’ pictures were common across European newspapers: they downplayed the risk of heatwaves, and excluded both the experiences of the most vulnerable, as well as excluding opportunities to visualise how we might adapt to extreme heat. With colleagues in computational social science and in journalism, she is working to understand how heatwave risk is visually represented across the world; and what opportunities and barriers exist to changing media practice. She is working with a diversity of media stakeholders to support moves towards a more responsible and equitable visual reporting of heat risk.