Training Journalists to Cover Climate Change

Reporters who cover climate issues often have trouble framing their stories in ways that are relevant to their readers and editors. So at a recent workshop for journalists, IRI's Molly Hellmuth encouraged the participants to think of climate change in terms of adaptation, development and equity.

"Anthropogenic change has been framed as an environmental pollution issue, and while this isn't a wrong definition, it is incomplete," she said.

The conference, called Tracking Global Climate Change, took place in Geneva last week and was designed to help journalists overcome some of the hurdles of reporting on the topic. Most of the attendees came from developing countries, which are expected to suffer the brunt of the consequences of global warming, despite having emitted the least amount of greenhouse-gas emissions. "Unfortunately, they stand to face the most serious impacts and have the least capacity to cope with and adapt to them," said Hellmuth, which makes it an equity issue that developed nations must address.

Hellmuth is the director of the IRI's new Climate and Society publication series, launched in early 2007 with an inaugural issue on climate risk management in Africa. She hopes to raise awareness about not only how climate impacts society, but also how it can be used as a resource to better manage health outcomes, agricultural production, and disaster risks.

For example, countries such as Mali, which rely predominantly on natural resources for their economic growth, are particularly vulnerable to climate variability. "When I spoke to farmers there, they told me, 'We are feeling climate change. The rainy season is starting later, it's less predictable, and has a shorter duration,'" Hellmuth recalled. So the Malian government developed an innovative program to help the farmers determine when they should plant and when they should apply fertilizer, and it requires the farmers to monitor the climate themselves. "The media plays a very large role in providing this information in newspapers and on TV," said Hellmuth.

Using a number of other examples from the report, she showed how one needn't wait fifty years to glimpse the impacts of climate change and how countries are trying to adapt to them. "In terms of what the future holds, there may be some instances of abrupt or unexpected changes, but much of what you will see will be increases in climate variability--increases in frequency and intensity of extreme events--which developing countries are already dealing with today," she said. 

Better management of this variability, Hellmuth said, would go a long way in reducing current disaster risks and adapting to future change.

Relevant Links
Climate Risk Management in Africa: Learning from Practice (PDF)

Audio file of Dr. Hellmuth's presentation in Geneva  (coming soon).