How to Report on Climate Change Effectively
The climate crisis is here. 2020 was one of the hottest years on record. In late August 2021, Central Park saw the most rainfall it had ever seen in a single hour, coinciding with a storm that flooded and devastated parts of New York City and New Jersey. Late spring this year saw a string of climate disasters. Speculation on climate change is a thing of the past.
Journalism is more often than not about chasing the truth through a series of specific questions, which makes beginning your work on reporting climate change difficult. Climate change is a very broad topic and involves everything from disasters to meteorology to infrastructure. And so, getting a dynamic and interesting story going can be challenging when our training teaches us to be so singular in our approaches. How can we adjust our process to make sure we are getting a solid look at the issue from several different perspectives?
INVOLVE COLLEAGUES AND EXPERTS
Climate change is, as stated, a broad topic. If you work in a newsroom, it’s likely that an anchor in every department has something to contribute to the conversation on climate change. Involve those colleagues in your work and collaborate to find correlations on data; cause/effect across different avenues; or else, just to find the humans who have been slammed by the consequences of our growing climate disasters. If you’re freelancing, pulling from sources outside of your normal go-tos, depending on your focus, will be crucial. Climate change affects society all the way from waste management workers, water plants, and mariners to hikers, firefighters, and prisoners. Your sources need to be broad in order for your reporting to deliver a complete picture on the true ramifications of climate change.
COVER THE MATERIAL ACCURATELY
In a webinar from Covering Climate Now, a Texas meteorologist expressed trepidation about covering climate change due to the anxiety/fear it could provoke in their audience. However, in the words of Ben Tracy, a CBS News senior national and environmental correspondent, “It’s not journalism to ignore what you know to be true, based on what you think your viewers want to hear.” The good news is, the United States media is currently 90 percent accurate in its materials covering climate change, and that audiences are still craving more accurate climate coverage, so there is always room to report on the material accurately.
HOLD PUBLIC OFFICIALS ACCOUNTABLE
President Joe Biden has broken many campaign promises regarding climate change, and a recent Supreme Court decision has also made it harder for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate carbon emissions. The role of the media in these cases must be to “hold [the government’s] feet to the fire,” according to Tracy. Holding public officials accountable includes a lot of investigative work: delving into public donation and financial records, cross-referencing interest groups and lobbyists, and eventually, making the connection to failed policy. These data points are key in order to really hold officials accountable in a public forum credibly.
KEEP LOOKING FOR CONNECTORS
The climate crisis is here to stay, and though you will not always be reporting directly on it, many of the stories a journalist will pick up in their normal workload will be a direct or an indirect consequence of the climate crisis. Keeping your eye on the aforementioned data you’ve come up with in collaboration with your colleagues will show trends over time as they may connect to your future reporting. Keeping these threads active in journalism is important so that consumers too can keep track of how the climate crisis is impacting their communities.
With an issue as far reaching as this, it takes a shakeup to one’s normal process in order to fully account for the avenues of reporting available. Climate change and the climate crisis will be impacting every corner of the world for an indeterminate amount of time. Journalists must adapt, as must the human race.
