Wild Ones #13: Communicating the Climate Crisis Was Hard. It Just Got A Lot Harder.
Covering climate change in a time of coronavirus
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Photo by Vincent Guth on Unsplash
“Before the virus entered our lives, the climate crisis already threatened millions of lives. Now, because of the virus, it threatens millions more.”
– Emily Atkin, climate reporter with Heated
2019: The cross-media push to cover the climate crisis begins
A lifetime ago, way back in early 2019, global cross-media push was organized to intensify the frequency and impact of international climate change coverage. That year, only 0.7% of mainstream media coverage addressed climate change, with a whopping total of only 238 minutes of climate change stories broadcast during the entire year.
The year before, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report that we had 12 years to radically transform our global energy system away from fossil-fuels to avert a catastrophic climate future. This was one of the most important scientific reports ever published. Yet in the United States, only 22 of the top 50 newspapers even mentioned it.
In response to this disturbing lack of climate coverage, Covering Climate Nowemerged as a strategic news initiative to ramp up climate journalism around the world, co-founded by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, and in partnership with The Guardian. Within a week, the initiative gained support from over 300 news outlets from around the world to reach a combined audience of more than 1 billion people.
In order to create momentum for bringing more central focus to the climate crisis in journalism around the world, Covering Climate Now is calling on news organizations to devote much more of their reporting to the climate crisis. This includes diverse reporting on the causes of climate change, its impacts on communities, as well as emerging climate solutions.
The initiative also brought greater focus to climate journalists who have been trying to center the climate justice movement for years; activists, writers and journalists like Robert Bullard, Naomi Klein, Emily Atkin, and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, just to name a few. Voices such as these underpinned this momentum pushing for a new era of climate reporting bringing to center stage the calamitous impacts of climate change on local communities around the world and the collapsing ecosystems they depend on for survival.
This all fueled greater public and political awareness about the climate crisis, especially as the Fridays for Future movement, led by youth activists like Greta Thunberg from Sweden and Vanessa Nakate from Uganda. But as the momentum sparked by Covering Climate Now built up, there were growing calls among climate journalists and activists alike that simply producing more coverage is not enough. We also need to rethink how we are covering the climate crisis.
In sum, the cross-media push to cover the climate crisis in 2019 not only energized global reporting on the climate emergency but also sparked a global conversation on how to cover it.
2020: It worked! Right?
Good news!
This global movement of journalists calling for more climate coverage quickly forced politicians, oil execs, and business-as-usual corporations around the world to reckon with their environmentally and socially destructive practices.
Realizing the folly of their ways, these elites have dramatically ramped up their efforts to support an international Green New Deal, harnessing their collective power to address the climate crisis on the planetary scale that the climate crisis demands of us.
…
Actually, no. Sorry. That hasn’t happened.
But the potential for this future scenario to unfold has been planted by the seeds of climate reporting and climate justice movements telling new, and powerful stories about climate impacts and solutions around the world.
As 2020 began, expectations were that this momentum —helped along by journalism organizations like Covering Climate Now and the Solutions Journalism Network, and energized by global climate movements such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement — would steadily galvanize support for real, transformational policy changes on a global scale.
However, a new crisis unexpectedly took center stage in our communication networks: COVID-19. Climate reporting has not only waned recently in favor of reporting on the spread of this global pandemic taking center stage, which is, of course, perfectly understandable.
The deluge of high-profile coverage of the global pandemic reveals a disparity in how mainstream media has covered the urgency of the climate crisis up to now.
Over the past year, the slow-but-steady rise of timely and accurate climate coverage has been an encouraging sign for analysts of climate media coverage. But now, with mainstream media’s 24-hour, in-depth coverage of the pandemic from the local to the global, the radical disparity in reporting on the two crises is stark. As Mark Hertsgaard, Executive Director of Covering Climate Now wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review:
“the media’s snapping to attention on coronavirus throws its coverage of the climate crisis into sharp relief. The press has never treated the climate story with anywhere near this level of attention or urgency.”
…
Continue reading more of this essay
Environmental Communication Digest
Research update: Ending a Sea of Confusion: Insights and Opportunities in Sea-Level Change Communication (The authors give some helpful advice on how to improve science communication about climate change).
Book recommendation: “How to save the world” by Katie Patrick. (I’ll be reviewing ideas from this awesome book more in the future, but suffice it to say this is the best presentation of how to apply insights from the field of behavior design for social change I’ve ever seen!).
Interview: “The Ecology of Perception: An Interview with David Abram”
Essay: Ecolinguistics and economics: the power of language to build worlds by Arran Stibbe, Professor of Ecological Linguistics, University of Gloucestershire. I tweeted about it too:
Thanks so much as always, and if you found this useful consider commenting or sharing with someone who might find it useful too:)
Gavin