From smog alerts to climate justice: new media narratives for environmental health awareness

Article information

Abstract

Introduction

Environmental health challenges constitute one of the most pressing and complex issues of the twenty-first century, intersecting public health, environmental governance, urban development, and climate change. According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2023), nearly seven million premature deaths each year are attributable to air pollution, with low- and middle-income countries disproportionately affected. These figures underscore not only the scale of environmental health risks but also their deep entanglement with global inequalities. In Latin America, rapid urbanization, uneven regulatory enforcement, and persistent socioeconomic disparities have intensified exposure to environmental hazards in major metropolitan regions such as Mexico City, Bogotá, and São Paulo (UNEP, 2022). Chronic air pollution, urban heat islands, and climate-related vulnerabilities in these cities pose significant threats to respiratory and cardiovascular health while simultaneously reinforcing structural forms of marginalization.

Environmental health risks in Latin American cities are not distributed evenly across populations. Communities located in peripheral or informal urban areas often experience higher exposure to pollution and climate stressors, combined with limited access to healthcare services, green spaces, and adaptive infrastructure. As a result, environmental health is inseparable from broader social, political, and economic dynamics. Addressing these challenges requires more than technical solutions or regulatory interventions; it demands communicative practices capable of articulating lived experience, fostering public awareness, and situating health risks within everyday social realities.

Historically, environmental health communication has relied on top-down strategies such as government-issued smog alerts, public health advisories, and institutional risk bulletins. While these mechanisms play a crucial role in disseminating timely information, they are often characterized by technocratic language, limited interactivity, and one-directional flows of communication. Such approaches may inform the public but frequently struggle to resonate emotionally or to engage communities in sustained reflection and dialogue. In many cases, environmental health risks are presented through abstract indicators—such as pollution indices or epidemiological statistics—that obscure the social conditions shaping vulnerability and exposure.

In contrast, the expansion of digital media platforms has transformed how environmental health information is produced, circulated, and interpreted. Social media platforms, mobile applications, and digital video-sharing services enable participatory forms of communication that foreground narrative, visuality, and interaction. Through digital storytelling practices, individuals and communities can narrate their experiences of pollution, climate impacts, and environmental injustice, thereby reframing environmental health risks in terms that are socially and emotionally meaningful (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Kim, 2021). These practices shift environmental health communication from a model centered on expert authority toward one that incorporates personal testimony, community knowledge, and experiential forms of evidence.

Research in health communication has increasingly emphasized the persuasive and cognitive power of narratives in shaping how risks are perceived and understood. Narrative-based communication has been shown to enhance comprehension, credibility, and identification compared to purely informational messaging (Dahlstrom, 2014; Green, 2020). Within environmental health contexts, digital storytelling practices—such as personal testimonies, short-form videos, and visual narratives—can translate abstract concepts like air pollution or climate change into concrete experiences embedded in daily life. By humanizing environmental health risks, these narrative forms have the potential to make health threats more salient and relatable, particularly within highly mediated urban environments.

At the same time, the emergence of climate justice as an analytical and normative framework has fore-grounded the ethical and political dimensions of environmental health communication. Climate justice emphasizes that environmental harms and health burdens are unevenly distributed along lines of class, race, gender, and geography, and that communities least responsible for environmental degradation often bear its most severe consequences (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014). From this perspective, communication is not merely a neutral vehicle for information transmission but a site where questions of equity, representation, and participation are negotiated. Digital storytelling practices, when embedded within participatory communication processes, may therefore function as tools for amplifying marginalized voices and articulating environmental health risks as matters of justice and rights rather than purely technical problems.

Despite the growing visibility of digital storytelling in environmental and climate-related campaigns, empirical research examining how these narrative practices are structured and evaluated within environmental health communication remains limited, particularly in Latin American urban contexts. While previous studies have analyzed social media use in climate activism and health communication more broadly (Anderson, 2017; Leong et al., 2019), fewer studies have systematically examined the narrative strategies employed in environmental health campaigns and the ways in which these strategies are assessed by professionals involved in communication, advocacy, and policy. As a result, there is a lack of empirical clarity regarding how digital storytelling is mobilized in practice, how different narrative forms are prioritized, and how their communicative potential is understood within institutional and advocacy settings.

This study responds to this gap by focusing on digital environmental health campaigns in Mexico City, Bogotá, and São Paulo. Rather than measuring audience effects or behavioral outcomes, the study adopts an analytical and descriptive approach that examines the narrative framing strategies, storytelling formats, and engagement-oriented communicative mechanisms deployed across campaigns. In addition, it incorporates the perspectives of health communicators, NGO activists, and policymakers to analyze how these narrative strategies are evaluated by expert actors who operate at the intersection of environmental health communication and climate justice advocacy.

Obejective

The objective of this article is to analyze how digital storytelling practices are employed in environmental health campaigns in major Latin American cities and to examine how narrative strategies are evaluated by communication professionals, NGO activists, and policymakers in relation to environmental health awareness and climate justice. Rather than advancing a causal hypothesis about audience effects or behavioral change, this study is guided by the analytical assumption that narrative strategies emphasizing personal testimony, emotional framing, and justice-oriented discourse are perceived by expert actors as having distinctive communicative potentials and limitations when compared to predominantly scientific or informational approaches. This study is guided by the following research questions:

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework of this study integrates three complementary strands of scholarship: environmental health communication, digital storytelling and new media narratives, and climate justice and participatory communication. Together, these perspectives provide the analytical foundation for examining how environmental health risks are narratively framed, how storytelling practices are structured across digital platforms, and how such practices are evaluated in relation to equity and justice. Rather than treating these bodies of literature as separate domains, this study brings them into dialogue to conceptualize digital storytelling as a mediating practice through which environmental health communication intersects with climate justice concerns in urban Latin American contexts.

Health and Environmental Communication

Health communication scholarship has long emphasized the importance of translating scientific knowledge into messages that can be understood, trusted, and acted upon by diverse audiences. In environmental health contexts, communication plays a critical role in shaping risk perception, encouraging preventive behaviors, and informing public debate and policy development (Wakefield et al., 2010). Traditional environmental health communication strategies—such as public service announcements, press releases, and institutional campaigns—have typically relied on top-down models of information dissemination that prioritize factual accuracy and expert authority.

While such approaches are essential for conveying technical information, scholars have noted their limitations, particularly in relation to cultural relevance, emotional resonance, and audience engagement (McComas, 2006). Technocratic language and abstract representations of risk may obscure the social conditions that shape vulnerability and exposure, thereby limiting the capacity of communication to resonate with affected communities. As a result, environmental health risks may be perceived as distant or impersonal, reducing their relevance for everyday decision-making.

More recent research has argued for a broader understanding of environmental health communication that integrates not only biomedical evidence but also social determinants of health and lived experience (Corburn, 2017). From this perspective, effective communication must acknowledge how environmental risks intersect with inequality, housing conditions, labor precarity, and access to healthcare. In Latin American cities, high levels of air pollution and exposure to climate-related hazards are deeply intertwined with socioeconomic disparities, amplifying the need for culturally responsive and context-sensitive communication strategies (UNEP, 2022).

From this standpoint, environmental health communication provides the conceptual basis for examining how risks are framed, contextualized, and translated in public discourse. It foregrounds the importance of narrative, framing, and cultural context in shaping how environmental health issues are understood and communicated, thereby informing the analytical focus of this study on narrative strategies deployed in digital campaigns.

Digital Storytelling and New Media Narratives

Digital storytelling has emerged as a prominent communication practice in health and environmental contexts, combining personal narratives, visual media, and participatory platforms to foster emotional engagement and social connection (Lambert, 2013; Dahlstrom, 2014). Unlike traditional fact-based messaging, narrative-based communication leverages identification and empathy, allowing audiences to process complex or abstract risks in more relatable ways (Green, 2020). Storytelling practices can humanize environmental health risks by situating them within everyday experiences and social relationships.

The affordances of new media—such as interactivity, multimodality, and networked dissemination—have expanded the scope and reach of storytelling practices (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). Social media platforms, mobile applications, and digital video-sharing services enable transmedia narratives that combine video, images, text, and testimonies across multiple channels. These platforms facilitate rapid circulation of content and lower barriers to participation, allowing individuals and communities to contribute to public discourse around environmental health.

Empirical research in health communication suggests that narrative-based and visually grounded communication can enhance comprehension, credibility, and trust compared to purely informational approaches (Houston et al., 2011). In environmental contexts, localized digital storytelling—such as testimonies from asthma patients, caregivers, or community activists—can make health risks linked to air pollution and climate change more tangible and emotionally salient. However, scholars also caution that digital storytelling is not inherently transformative. Narrative-driven campaigns may be fragmented, short-lived, or constrained by platform algorithms that privilege visibility over depth, and they may circulate primarily among already-engaged publics (Anderson, 2017).

These tensions highlight the need to examine digital storytelling practices not only in terms of their presence or popularity, but also in terms of how narratives are structured, framed, and evaluated within specific institutional and advocacy contexts. Accordingly, digital storytelling serves as a key analytical dimension in this study, guiding the examination of narrative formats, affective framing, and platform-specific storytelling practices in environmental health campaigns.

Climate Justice and Participatory Communication

The concept of climate justice reframes environmental risks as issues of equity and human rights, emphasizing how marginalized groups disproportionately bear the health and social costs of pollution and climate change (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014). Climate justice scholarship draws attention to the structural conditions that shape exposure, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity, highlighting the ethical and political dimensions of environmental health.

Communication is central to advancing climate justice, as it mediates which voices are amplified, which risks are prioritized, and how solutions are framed. Participatory communication models emphasize bottom-up approaches that enable communities to articulate their own experiences, knowledge, and demands (Servaes, 2016). Such approaches challenge deficit models of communication by recognizing local knowledge and lived experience as valuable forms of expertise. In Latin America, participatory communication has deep roots in community media, popular education, and grassroots activism. With the expansion of digital platforms, these practices have increasingly migrated online, where activists and community organizations use social media to denounce environmental injustices, mobilize collective action, and pressure institutions to adopt more inclusive policies (McDonald, 2020). These dynamics align with the notion of “mediated environmental justice” (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018), which conceptualizes communication as a site of contestation and transformation.

Within this framework, climate justice and participatory communication offer critical lenses for evaluating how digital narratives articulate issues of equity, representation, and structural inequality in environmental health advocacy. They foreground questions of whose stories are told, how risks are framed in relation to social injustice, and how participatory storytelling practices may challenge dominant discourses.

Integrative Analytical Framework

Taken together, environmental health communication, digital storytelling, and climate justice form an integrated analytical framework for this study. This framework conceptualizes digital storytelling as a mediating practice through which environmental health risks are narratively framed, emotionally contextualized, and politically situated within claims of justice and equity. By integrating these strands, the study moves beyond assessing whether narratives are effective in a narrow sense, focusing instead on how narrative strategies are constructed, circulated, and evaluated within environmental health campaigns.

Guided by this integrated framework, the analysis examines narrative framing strategies, storytelling formats, and engagement-oriented communicative mechanisms deployed in digital environmental health campaigns, as well as how these strategies are evaluated by expert actors involved in communication, advocacy, and policy. This approach enables a nuanced understanding of digital storytelling as both a communicative practice and a site of negotiation between environmental health knowledge, lived experience, and climate justice claims.

Methods

This study adopts a mixed-methods research design to examine how digital storytelling practices are deployed in environmental health campaigns and how these practices are evaluated within climate justice discourses in Latin America. The methodological approach integrates qualitative content analysis of digital campaigns with semi-structured interviews with expert actors. Rather than assessing causal effects or behavioral outcomes among audiences, the study is designed to provide a descriptive and analytical account of narrative strategies, storytelling formats, and engagement-oriented communicative mechanisms, alongside expert evaluations of their communicative potential and limitations. This design aligns with the study’s analytical objectives and with established approaches in health communication and digital media research that prioritize transparency, contextualization, and interpretive depth.

The empirical focus is on three major Latin American metropolitan areas: Mexico City (Mexico), Bogotá (Colombia), and São Paulo (Brazil). These cities were selected because they combine high levels of environmental health risk—particularly related to air pollution, heat exposure, and climate-related vulnerabilities—with dense digital media ecosystems and active civil society engagement. In each case, environmental health risks intersect with socioeconomic inequality, governance challenges, and long-standing traditions of civic and activist communication, making these urban contexts especially relevant for examining digital storytelling in environmental health advocacy. The comparative design allows for the identification of shared regional patterns as well as city-specific variations in narrative strategies and communicative practices.

Data collection was conducted between January 2022 and December 2024. All digital campaigns and interviews analyzed in this study were completed prior to manuscript submission, and no future, ongoing, or incomplete data were included in the analyses. The study therefore draws on a closed and finalized dataset.

The first component of the dataset consists of 50 digital environmental health campaigns disseminated across social media platforms and digital communication channels. Fifteen campaigns were selected from each city (Mexico City, Bogotá, and São Paulo), along with five transnational campaigns that had a strong presence and circulation within the region. Campaigns were identified through a systematic multi-step procedure that combined platform-specific searches on Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and relevant mobile health applications; hashtag tracking using terms such as #AireLimpioCDMX, #BogotáRespira, and #Justiça-Climática; and recommendations from environmental NGOs, governmental agencies, and communication networks active in environmental health and climate advocacy.

To be included in the sample, campaigns were required to meet three criteria. First, they had to focus explicitly on environmental health risks, including air pollution, heat exposure, respiratory disease, or climate-related illness. Second, campaigns had to employ identifiable narrative strategies, operationalized as the presence of storytelling elements such as personal testimonies, named or identifiable protagonists, temporal or causal sequencing, or visual framing of lived experience. Third, campaigns were required to exhibit organic engagement indicators, such as views, likes, shares, comments, or press coverage, indicating public circulation beyond closed or internal communication channels.

Campaigns were excluded if they lacked narrative elements—for example, when they consisted solely of technical bulletins or informational notices without storytelling components—or if their engagement metrics were primarily driven by paid advertising. Paid promotion was identified through platform transparency tools, explicit campaign disclosures, and engagement patterns indicative of artificial amplification rather than sustained organic interaction. These inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied consistently across all cases in order to reduce selection bias and to ensure analytical comparability.

The second component of the dataset comprises 25 semi-structured interviews conducted with expert actors directly involved in environmental health communication. Interviewees included health communication professionals (n = 8), NGO and climate justice activists (n = 9), and policymakers or municipal officials working in health or environmental departments (n = 8). Participants were selected through purposive sampling based on their professional roles in campaign design, advocacy, or policy implementation, followed by limited snowball sampling to broaden institutional representation and capture diverse perspectives.

Interviews were conducted in Spanish or Portuguese according to participant preference, lasted approximately 45–60 minutes, and were audio-recorded with informed consent before being transcribed verbatim. The interview protocol explored expert perspectives on digital storytelling as a communication strategy, perceived strengths and limitations of different narrative approaches, challenges in reaching vulnerable populations, and difficulties associated with integrating digital narratives into longer-term institutional and policy frameworks. Importantly, the interviews were not designed to assess audience reception or behavioral impact; instead, they elicited professional evaluations of narrative strategies and their communicative role within environmental health and climate justice advocacy.

To ensure analytical transparency and replicability, a structured coding scheme was developed to operationalize the main analytical categories used in the content analysis. The content analysis followed a qualitative, category-based approach that combined deductive and inductive coding procedures (Mayring, 2014). Coding categories were refined through an iterative process to ensure conceptual clarity and analytical consistency across campaigns.

Three overarching dimensions guided the coding process: risk framing, narrative format, and engagement-oriented communicative strategies. Risk framing captured how environmental health risks were represented within campaigns and was coded as scientific framing when risks were communicated primarily through data, expert authority, or technical explanation; emotional framing when narratives emphasized affective appeals, empathy, or personal suffering; and justice-oriented framing when risks were explicitly linked to issues of equity, rights, structural inequality, or social responsibility.

Narrative format referred to the form through which storytelling was enacted. Personal testimony was coded when campaigns foregrounded first-person accounts or identifiable individual experiences. Visual narrative was coded when meaning was primarily constructed through images, videos, or graphic storytelling rather than textual exposition. Transmedia storytelling was coded when a campaign intentionally combined multiple platforms or formats—such as short videos, infographics, and interactive tools—to sustain a coherent narrative across channels. Engagement-oriented strategies captured communicative mechanisms designed to encourage interaction, including the use of hashtags, calls to action, interactive features, and participatory invitations such as sharing personal experiences or mobilizing collective responses.

An initial round of preliminary coding was conducted on a subsample of ten campaigns to refine category definitions and resolve ambiguities in the codebook. Following this pilot phase, the full dataset was coded independently by two trained coders. Intercoder reliability was assessed using Cohen’s kappa, with coefficients exceeding 0.80 across the main analytical categories, indicating substantial agreement. Discrepancies were resolved through discussion and consensus.

The content analysis focused on identifying the prevalence and distribution of narrative strategies across campaigns, with results reported descriptively and comparatively across cities. Quantitative counts and percentages were used to summarize coding outcomes. No inferential statistical tests were conducted, as the study aims to describe patterns and expert evaluations rather than to test causal relationships. Interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013), proceeding iteratively to identify recurrent themes related to strategic communicative reasoning, perceived effectiveness and limitations of narrative approaches, and institutional constraints shaping environmental health communication. NVivo software was used to assist with coding and data organization.

The study adhered to established ethical standards for research involving human participants. All interviewees provided informed consent and were assured anonymity. Publicly available digital content was analyzed in accordance with ethical guidelines for social media research, with usernames anonymized in reporting. The study received approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee of Universidad Panamericana.

Finally, the methodological design prioritizes analytical depth and transparency over statistical generalizability. While focusing on three major urban centers limits extrapolation to rural contexts or other regions, it allows for a detailed examination of narrative strategies in settings characterized by high environmental health risk and active digital communication ecosystems. The reliance on expert evaluation rather than audience data is a deliberate design choice aligned with the study’s research questions and is addressed further in the Discussion section.

Results

The analysis of 50 digital storytelling campaigns and 25 semi-structured interviews offers empirical insight into how new media narratives frame environmental health risks in Latin American urban contexts and how these narrative practices are evaluated by expert actors. In line with the study’s analytical objectives, the results are presented in three subsections: (1) narrative strategies across campaigns, (2) observed patterns of audience engagement, and (3) stakeholder perspectives on the opportunities and challenges of digital storytelling for environmental health and climate justice. The findings are reported descriptively and comparatively, without inferential statistical testing.

Narrative Strategies in Environmental Health Campaigns

The content analysis indicates that narrative-driven approaches are prevalent across the analyzed campaigns. Emotional framing and personal testimonies appear frequently, often coexisting with visual and transmedia storytelling practices. Specifically, 72% of the campaigns included personal stories, such as testimonies from individuals affected by asthma or pollution-related health conditions, while 54% employed transmedia strategies that combined short-form videos, infographics, and interactive digital tools. Visual framing was the most widespread strategy, present in 88% of campaigns, whereas scientific framing based primarily on data visualization or expert authority appeared in 40% of cases.

These patterns are summarized in Table 1, which presents the distribution of narrative strategies across Mexico City, Bogotá, São Paulo, and transnational campaigns. As shown in the table, emotional and justice-oriented framing strategies were present across all three cities, although their relative prevalence varied slightly by context. Justice-oriented framing, which linked environmental health risks to issues of equity, rights, or social responsibility, appeared in just over half of the campaigns, suggesting a strong connection between environmental health communication and broader climate justice discourses.

Table 1

Narrative Strategies Identified in Campaigns

Audience Engagement Levels

Observed engagement metrics—including views, likes, shares, and comments—varied systematically across different narrative strategies. Campaigns that relied on visual narratives, personal testimonies, and justice-oriented framing were associated with higher levels of interaction than campaigns that relied primarily on scientific or informational framing. For instance, campaigns centered on personal testimonies commonly reached average view counts in the range of 150,000 to 190,000 views, whereas campaigns based on technical infographics or expert-driven messaging often recorded average view counts below 12,000.

Figure 1 illustrates these patterns by comparing average engagement levels across narrative strategies. As shown in the figure, personal testimony and justice-oriented framing are associated with notably higher levels of interaction than scientific framing. These patterns were particularly visible on visual-first platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where short-form video content facilitated rapid circulation and audience interaction.

Figure 1

Average Engagement Levels by Narrative Strategy

At the city level, engagement patterns also varied. Campaigns originating in Mexico City exhibited the highest overall levels of interaction, particularly those framed around the “right to clean air.” Bogotá campaigns showed moderate engagement levels, often combining emotional narratives with policy-oriented messaging. In contrast, campaigns from São Paulo tended to adopt more institutional communication styles and displayed comparatively lower levels of audience interaction.

These cross-city differences are illustrated in Figure 2, which compares average engagement levels across the three metropolitan areas. The figure highlights a gradient of engagement, with Mexico City showing the highest levels, followed by Bogotá and São Paulo.

Figure 2

Comparative Engagement by City

Source: Author’s analysis of 50 digital storytelling campaigns (2022–2024).

Stakeholder Perspectives

The semi-structured interviews provide additional insight into how digital storytelling practices are perceived and evaluated by professionals involved in environmental health communication, activism, and policy. Across stakeholder groups, interviewees consistently emphasized the role of storytelling in contextualizing environmental health risks and making them more relatable to the public.

Health communication professionals frequently described narrative-based content as a means of humanizing abstract risks, noting that personal stories could convey urgency and relevance more effectively than statistical information alone. NGO activists highlighted digital platforms as important spaces for amplifying marginalized voices and for enabling communities to narrate their own experiences of pollution and environmental injustice. Policymakers, while acknowledging the visibility generated by digital campaigns, expressed concerns regarding their sustainability and their limited integration into long-term institutional and policy frameworks.

These perspectives are summarized in Table 2, which outlines perceived strengths and weaknesses of digital storytelling across stakeholder groups. While there is broad consensus regarding the communicative value of narrative-driven approaches for raising awareness, stakeholders also pointed to constraints related to misinformation risks, resource limitations, and fragmented policy uptake.

Table 2

Stakeholder Perspectives on Digital Storytelling

Summary of Findings

Taken together, the results reveal several consistent patterns. First, emotional and justice-oriented storytelling approaches dominate the narrative landscape of digital environmental health campaigns. Second, visual-first platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are associated with higher levels of observed engagement compared to text-based or highly technical communication formats. Third, notable differences emerge across cities, with Mexico City campaigns exhibiting the strongest digital resonance and São Paulo campaigns displaying a more institutional communication profile. Finally, stakeholder evaluations suggest that while digital storytelling is widely viewed as valuable for awareness-building, its longer-term impact depends on sustained, localized, and institutionally integrated communication strategies.

Discussion

The findings of this study both confirm and extend existing scholarship on the role of narrative-based communication in environmental health and climate-related contexts. Consistent with prior research, the results indicate that emotionally grounded, visually rich, and justice-oriented narratives are central features of contemporary digital environmental health campaigns in Latin American cities. At the same time, the analysis complicates overly optimistic assumptions about narrative effectiveness by demonstrating that high levels of visibility and engagement do not automatically translate into sustained institutional or structural impact. This tension between narrative resonance and policy integration emerges as a central theme in understanding the possibilities and limits of current digital storytelling practices.

While earlier studies have shown that narrative approaches enhance message credibility, retention, and identification when compared to fact-based communication alone (Dahlstrom, 2014; Green, 2020), the present findings suggest that these dynamics are intensified in digital environments characterized by visual-first platforms and participatory affordances. Campaigns that combined personal testimonies with justice-oriented framing consistently displayed higher observed engagement, indicating that digital audiences are particularly responsive to narratives that are simultaneously emotionally resonant and politically meaningful. However, as highlighted by policymakers interviewed in this study, such engagement often remains fragmented unless it is embedded within longer-term institutional programs, public health strategies, or regulatory frameworks.

Digital Storytelling as a Bridge Between Science and Lived Experience

One of the most significant insights generated by this study is the role of digital storytelling in translating abstract environmental health risks into tangible and relatable experiences. Indicators such as particulate matter concentrations, pollution indices, or heat exposure thresholds are often difficult for non-expert audiences to interpret in meaningful ways. Interviewees repeatedly emphasized that narratives featuring parents of asthmatic children, workers exposed to polluted environments, or residents living near major traffic corridors made environmental health risks visible and emotionally salient in ways that official alerts and technical bulletins could not.

This finding supports calls within environmental health scholarship for culturally grounded communication strategies that situate risk within social and material contexts (Corburn, 2017). By connecting scientific information to lived experience, digital storytelling appears to reduce the perceived distance between institutions and communities, fostering trust and facilitating comprehension. Importantly, this bridging function does not replace scientific evidence but recontextualizes it, allowing health risks to be understood not only as technical problems but as everyday realities shaped by inequality and governance.

Climate Justice and the Politics of Representation

The prominence of justice-oriented narratives across the analyzed campaigns underscores the growing alignment between environmental health communication and climate justice discourses. Rather than framing pollution and climate-related health risks as neutral or purely technical issues, many campaigns explicitly linked these risks to questions of equity, rights, and systemic inequality. This framing resonates strongly with climate justice scholarship, which emphasizes that environmental harms are unevenly distributed and that marginalized communities often bear disproportionate health burdens (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014).

Interview data further reveal that digital platforms function as critical spaces for the politics of representation. NGO activists highlighted how social media enables groups traditionally excluded from institutional communication to circulate their own stories and challenge dominant narratives. These practices align with participatory communication models that emphasize bottom-up storytelling and community knowledge (Servaes, 2016), and they extend the concept of “mediated environmental justice” by illustrating how digital affordances amplify grassroots voices in environmental health advocacy (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018).

At the same time, the findings caution against romanticizing participatory storytelling. While digital platforms facilitate visibility, they do not inherently redistribute power or guarantee policy responsiveness. Justice-oriented narratives may gain traction online yet struggle to penetrate institutional decision-making processes, highlighting ongoing asymmetries between narrative expression and structural change.

Platform Dynamics and Audience Engagement

The comparative analysis across platforms reveals that TikTok and Instagram outperform Twitter/X and YouTube in terms of observed engagement, particularly for short-form, visually oriented, and emotionally charged content. These patterns suggest that platform-specific affordances shape not only how narratives are produced but also how they circulate and are interacted with. Visual-first platforms appear especially conducive to storytelling practices that rely on immediacy, affect, and personalization. However, reliance on algorithm-driven platforms introduces vulnerabilities. Attention may be fleeting, narratives may circulate within limited or homogeneous networks, and misinformation can spread alongside credible content (Anderson, 2017). Moreover, platform algorithms remain opaque, making it difficult to disentangle organic engagement from visibility shaped by automated recommendation systems. As a result, engagement metrics should be interpreted cautiously and understood as indicators of attention rather than definitive measures of communicative impact.

Limitations of Digital Storytelling

Despite its communicative strengths, digital storytelling alone is insufficient to sustain long-term behavioral or policy change. Policymakers interviewed in this study emphasized that many campaigns remain episodic, tied to specific events or moments of heightened attention, and lack continuity over time. This limitation points to a structural challenge: while new media narratives can mobilize awareness and empathy, their integration into education systems, public health programming, and regulatory processes remains limited.

Additional limitations relate to the methodological scope of the study. Engagement metrics such as views, likes, and shares provide only partial insight into communicative reach and do not capture deeper cognitive, attitudinal, or behavioral changes. Furthermore, while Figures 1 and 2 summarize engagement patterns across strategies and cities, these patterns are influenced by platform-specific dynamics that are not fully transparent. The reliance on expert interviews also means that the analysis reflects professional evaluations rather than direct audience reception, a limitation that future research could address through complementary audience-based methods.

Toward a Framework for Environmental Health Advocacy

Building on these findings, the study proposes a framework for strengthening environmental health advocacy through digital storytelling. This framework emphasizes the need to combine narrative resonance with justice-oriented framing, platform-sensitive design, and institutional integration. Effective advocacy, in this view, requires not only emotionally compelling stories but also sustained collaboration between civil society actors, health professionals, and policymakers.

This integrative perspective echoes calls for mediated environmental justice (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018) while extending them into the context of contemporary digital platforms, where storytelling is participatory, algorithmically mediated, and transnational in scope. By situating digital storytelling within broader governance and policy contexts, the framework underscores that narrative visibility is a necessary but insufficient condition for structural change.

Implications for Research and Practice

For scholars, this study highlights the importance of analyzing environmental health communication at the intersection of narrative form, platform dynamics, and institutional context. Future research could expand on this work by incorporating longitudinal designs, audience-centered methodologies, or comparative analyses across different regulatory environments.

For practitioners, the findings suggest that investing in community-driven storytelling and leveraging visual-first platforms can enhance the visibility and resonance of environmental health campaigns. However, practitioners should also prioritize continuity, localization, and alignment with institutional partners to move beyond episodic engagement.

For policymakers, the results underscore the need to embed digital storytelling initiatives within broader health and climate justice frameworks. Without such integration, the communicative potential of digital narratives is likely to remain underutilized.

Conclusions and Future Research Directions

This study has examined how digital storytelling practices are employed to communicate environmental health risks in three major Latin American cities—Mexico City, Bogotá, and São Paulo—and how these practices are evaluated by expert actors involved in communication, activism, and policy. By combining content analysis of digital campaigns with expert interviews, the study provides a descriptive and context-sensitive account of the narrative strategies, storytelling formats, and engagement-oriented communicative mechanisms that characterize contemporary environmental health communication in urban Latin American settings.

The findings indicate that emotionally grounded and justice-oriented narratives, particularly those disseminated through visual-first platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, are prominent features of environmental health campaigns. By centering personal testimonies and equity-oriented frames, these narratives contribute to situating environmental health risks within lived experience and to amplifying voices that are often marginalized in institutional communication. Rather than treating pollution or climate-related health risks as abstract or purely technical issues, digital storytelling practices foreground everyday realities, social inequalities, and claims to rights, thereby reshaping how environmental health is communicated and understood.

At the same time, the analysis highlights important limitations of digital storytelling as a standalone communicative strategy. While narrative-driven campaigns are widely perceived by expert actors as effective in mobilizing attention and generating visibility, the study shows that such visibility does not automatically translate into sustained institutional impact or policy change. Consistent with policymakers’ observations, the findings suggest that digital storytelling initiatives often remain fragmented and episodic unless they are embedded within longer-term public health programs, educational initiatives, or regulatory frameworks. This tension between narrative visibility and institutional integration emerges as a central constraint on the transformative potential of digital storytelling in environmental health advocacy.

The study also underscores the importance of contextual and platform-specific dynamics. Differences observed across cities and platforms indicate that digital storytelling practices are shaped by local political cultures, media ecosystems, and governance arrangements. Visual-first platforms facilitate rapid circulation and interaction, but they also introduce vulnerabilities related to algorithmic opacity, fleeting attention, and the coexistence of credible information with misinformation. As a result, engagement metrics should be interpreted cautiously and understood as indicators of attention rather than definitive measures of communicative or policy impact.

Future research should continue to explore the intersection of environmental health communication, digital media affordances, and participatory justice frameworks. Comparative studies across rural and urban contexts would help clarify how storytelling practices operate in settings with different infrastructural and governance conditions. Longitudinal analyses could examine how narrative strategies evolve over time and whether sustained integration into institutional frameworks alters their communicative role. In addition, closer examination of algorithmic dynamics and platform governance could provide deeper insight into how visibility and engagement are shaped in digital environments. Further interdisciplinary collaboration between communication scholars, public health researchers, and environmental scientists may also contribute to the development of more integrated approaches to environmental health advocacy. Such collaborations could help identify pathways for embedding digital storytelling practices into multi-level responses that connect community narratives with policy design, public health planning, and climate governance.

In conclusion, digital storytelling should be understood not simply as a communication tool but as a contextual and relational practice whose value depends on how it is embedded within broader institutional, cultural, and policy environments. When aligned with participatory design principles, culturally grounded narratives, and sustained governance efforts, digital storytelling can contribute to more inclusive and reflexive approaches to environmental health communication and climate justice in Latin America and beyond.

Article information Continued