CCNow Basics: Reporting Solutions

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Hello and welcome to this training session with Covering Climate Now. I’m Mark Hertsgaard. I’m the executive director and one of the co-founders of Covering Climate Now, and joining me today on this session are my colleagues. Let me introduce you to them in turn. First, Santiago Sáez. Santiago is our Director of Training. Also, David Dickson. David is our TV Engagement Coordinator and also our in-house meteorologist. And Elena González, she’s our TV Engagement Manager. Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of more than 500 newsrooms around the world that reach a total audience of billions of people every day. Our partners range from large global companies all the way down to small independent operations and freelance journalists.

Everything that we offer is free. All of us in this collaboration have one common purpose, which is to cover the climate story with the urgency and the quality that it deserves. Today’s session is called Covering Climate Now Basics. It’s a series that’s dedicated to journalists all over the world, but we will focus on early career reporters, young professionals, and those who are taking their first steps on the climate beat. Also, veteran climate reporters who want to have a refresher perhaps. You’re going to expect in these sessions very clear, accessible language, basic tips on how to research and structure your stories. Also, some practical examples. We’ll provide resources, but if you’re interested in a deeper dive, please know the Covering Climate Now also provides specific trainings to newsrooms.

So go to our website coveringclimatenow.org, where you’ll find all the different kinds of possibilities that our collaboration offers you. This particular session is the second in our series. You can find the first one in all of our other products at our YouTube channel. And you might also like to know that Covering Climate Now provides a lot of other resources. Check out our talking shop webinars, our press briefings. You should sign up for our newsletters. The Climate Beat Newsletter comes out every Thursday–just came out about an hour ago here in New York. And that will keep you on the cutting edge of the climate story. Also with some of the week’s best climate reporting and a listing of jobs for those of you who are looking around.

And as I said, if you’re interested in more specific trainings, please get in touch with us. We offer those customized to all different kinds of our partners and you can just get in touch with us. You can try us at editors@coveringclimatenow.org. And finally, of course, if you’re not already a partner, please consider joining. As I said earlier, all of our services are free of charge. There is no editorial line here at Covering Climate Now except for one thing, no climate denial, but you probably wouldn’t be on this call if you were a climate denier in the first place. So with that, I’m going to throw it to my colleague, Santiago Sáez. And take it away, Santi.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: Thank you so much, Mark. And all right, let’s get started. So today we’re talking about climate solutions. We are going to explore what they are, why covering them is so important and how to do it effectively as journalists. So let’s go. Let’s start by defining solutions because we’re not just talking about solar panels here. Climate solutions are, as we define them, measures, policies, or actions that are designed to mitigate global warming by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that will set the heat trapping gases that are in the atmosphere or to adapt to unavoidable climate impact. They include, for example, well, transitioning away from fossil fuels, protecting forests and oceans, reforming farming practices, enacting policies and investments that spur renewable energy, and also, of course, energy efficiency and many, many others.

The success of these solutions, you cannot point to one single place, but they depend on governments, they depend on businesses, they depend on the civil society, all collaborating together to rapidly reduce emissions, transform the economic and social systems that have brought us here, and support vulnerable communities all the way. Now we can categorize just one second before we move on. Check that out that I haven’t mentioned objects as climate solutions, measures, policies and actions. So a solar panel is great, but only the policies, the actions of installing it at scale actually is a climate solution. Now, coming back. We can categorize more solutions either as part of mitigation or adaptation. Mitigation and adaptation are two terms, if you’re starting in your climate journalism journey right now are very, very important and you will encounter them a lot.

And not only when you’re talking about solutions. So let’s see them really, really quickly. Mitigation refers to the actions that address that attack, the root cause of climate change. That is the excessive amount of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere. This you can do in two ways, either by removing those greenhouse gases or more often and actually way more effectively by avoiding that those gases get to the atmosphere in the first place. We talk about mitigation when we say, for example, that the most important solution of climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels like that. That is the central element here. But we also, when we say about planting, afforestation, avoiding deforestation, all that are mitigation solutions. Adaptation, on the other hand, addresses what already is broken.

They address the unavoidable impacts of global warming. We’re going to see lots of examples today, so you’re going to see these very, very clearly, but just very quickly, cooling centers, for example, in areas where heat waves are a concern or mangrove forests in areas where coastal flooding is the problem to avoid. So let’s see some examples to anchor these two very, very important concepts. Here’s one, and I’m really sorry about this horrible way that I cut this photo. The format really didn’t lend itself to any other things, so I’m really sorry and really sorry to our colleagues and partners at Inside Climate Now for butchering the photo here.

Anyway, for those of you who are not looking at the screen right now, I’ll read the headline: “How an Unlikely Coalition of Climate Activists and a Gas Utility Are Weaning a Boston Suburb Off Fossil Fuels.” So all right, this is a story, very straightforward. They’re replacing fossil fuels for geothermal energy in this particular case to heat a neighborhood in the suburbs of Boston. This is very obviously a mitigation story because of course, well they’re trying to stop using fossil fuels. And let’s see one about adaptation just to see the difference. This is from a magazine called Reasons to Be Cheerful, which has lots of solutions stories and this one is “How Farmers Used California’s Floods to Revive Underground Aquifers.”

And this is an adaptation story because floods and also water scarcity are a problem that Californian farmers already understand are going to happen and they’re already happening. So they’re adapting their farming techniques in order to use that and not only survive, but actually if possible at all, thrive in these new conditions. Before we go ahead with more examples and more concepts and solutions, let me give you a quick word on solutions and climate justice. And by the way, you have the questions and answers function at the bottom. If you have any questions at all, we’ve saved some time at the end, so we’ll go there and if there’s anything urgent, David or I will answer in writing while we’re talking here.

So coming back, sorry, climate justice, very, very important. Why? Solutions are very urgent for all of us. We are all in a situation where we cannot wait. Time is of the essence, but they are specifically, particularly urgent to the communities. The people who suffer climate impacts disproportionately. These are the poor, people of color, indigenous people, community, sorry, women, children, and future generations and many others. The Global South, of course, more than the Global North. These communities have contributed the least to the pollution that is overheating the planet, but they also bear the worst consequences of this climate crisis. They bear the brunt and they also have less resources, less financial resources to cope with those impacts.

So for those communities, solutions are specifically urgent and it’s very unfair. It’s very unjust that solutions are not being developed and deployed at speed right now. Some of these communities also, to add to this, have proven records of effective climate action, and I’m thinking specifically about indigenous peoples here. So with that in mind, we have seen mitigation, adaptation, climate justice, three very important concepts when you report about solutions. Now, let’s see, where can we find solutions? Solutions can be found at all levels of social organization. From individual actions that anyone can take such as, I don’t know, taking the bus instead of the car or buying food that was produced nearby, like local produce, through international negotiations, COP conferences and everything in between.

National level, states, provinces, cities, and community level as well. When you see the solutions’ coverage worldwide, of course we cover all of this, but if there’s one that we would say is underreported, it’s the community level and that means that it’s a niche for you all to address. Some place that you can explore in your local community, wherever you are, based on whatever you report. You can find these stories talking to local NGOs, local businesses, political groups, neighborhood groups, all sorts of community organizing, and they’re very, very interesting to investigate. If you were in our first training, the Three Pillars, these are also great stories to hit those Three Pillars. If you remember, those are humanize, localize, and solutionize.

It’s not always so easy to localize for pro-national stories, but the community stories are great for that. That means that your storytelling would be easier. The two examples that we’ve seen before, the Boston community, the Boston neighborhood and the California farmers could actually fit pretty well in that description of community solution. But let’s see, another example just to make it really, really clear because this one is super straightforward. This community in El Salvador monitoring the sea and the rain through WhatsApp, right? This is a story published by Earth Journalism Network. It’s also in Spanish, by the way, we’ll send you all these links in an email that we’ll send later today.

So you’ll receive them along with a recording of this session and all the resources that we’ll mention. So no worries, you don’t need to be copy pasting everything that we put there. If you miss something, that’s totally fine, you’ll get it in your email. But in this story, by the way, this is a story about a community protecting itself against the impacts of climate change and it’s covering the gaps that the government is neglecting. So you have here a very clear adaptation story. This is not mitigation. We’re not talking about reducing the impacts, but adapting to the ones that are already happening. One word of caution here. It doesn’t matter what stories you decide to cover, it doesn’t matter what solutions you cover, it doesn’t matter if you decide to cover just what your government is doing or individual solutions or anything in between or COP.

There are no silver bullets, there is no magical solution. There is no perfect solution. The only thing that you could think about that could be something similar to a perfect solution would be stopping fossil fuel consumption overnight. That is not going to happen very likely, and if it did happen, it would bring a lot of disruption and a lot of problems associated. So apart from that, we can forget about that one. There are no miracle cures, there’s no solutions that by themselves can end our troubles. We need a mix of all or most solutions that are available. And time is also part of this equation. So keep your eyes open and keep your skeptical senses tingling.

If somebody comes to you and says, “This is the solution,” and this is something many of our colleagues in PR have done sometimes, “We have the final solution, we can forget about everything else. This is the right thing for climate change.” It should get something tingling there. In all likelihood they’re trying to sell you something there. There’s no perfect solutions. If you have any questions, remember you have the Q&A function there at the bottom and we’ll get to them as soon as possible. And now I’ll let David take it on to talk about data and how to actually take these stories.

David Dickson: Thank you Santiago, and thanks again to all of you for being here today. It’s really important. So let’s go ahead and talk a little bit more about why all this emphasis on solutions. Why is it so important that we make them one of our three pillars that we talk about at length. Remember that is solutionizing or offering solutions, humanizing and localizing. So let’s explore why it’s important to cover these solutions, to cover them critically and to cover them consistently. Now, covering solutions is simply just part of our job as journalists. The climate crisis is complicated. It’s a multifaceted, sprawling story that really can’t be understood without solutions. So when you cover climate change, you’re doing more than just covering events.

You not only need to connect the dots between these events and the science and between the events and in of themselves because the events in isolation are meaningless. This is a fascinating job of zooming in into the local, to the statewide, and then zooming out of the map and looking at things and how it relates into a larger global crisis that we are seeing. And solutions are a key element in this big picture story. So the next big reason to cover solutions is that simply it’s what your audience wants. And in many ways, especially as we as journalists want to cater to our audience, this is especially important. So let me quote directly from a news report from Reuters just last year, which is based on a global survey of editors and news directors:

“In thinking about the reasons for flat or declining engagement, the vast majority of publishers, 72%, are concerned about a trend where more users are actively avoiding the news. This digital news report data shows that this selective avoidance has doubled in some countries since 2017 because many people feel that the media coverage is overly negative, repetitive, hard to trust, and leaves people feeling powerless.” It’s an understandable feeling, but here’s some data from the same report with responses from editors. As you can see, solutions journalism is essentially at the very top of the proposed ways to counter news avoidance. The only two other things that have near universal acceptance is exemplary journalism, which we all are striving to do, and then Q&A formats rather to answer questions.

Solutions journalism is right there. This is in line with the absolutely overwhelming majority of anecdotal evidence that we and our partners have at Covering Climate Now and here in our daily work. People want to know what they can do or what their governments and local governments can do as well. Climate stories that contain climate solutions often get more engagement and enable conversations across polarized divides, whether political or anything else. They just work better across the board. But what we also wanted to highlight here is not only that, solutions stories are not equal to positive or uplifting stories. As far as this data goes, let’s look at another data snippet. This time from people that actively avoid the news.

Confirming that these news avoiders are way more interested in solutions stories than any other category except positive news, including the big news of the day. So again, this is some data from that same report from Reuters, which looks at the proportion of news avoiders, people that tried to actively avoid the news to say that they are interested in a different type, whether it’s positive, and then you can see solutions right there. And finally, this is also based on anecdotal but also substantial evidence that solutions stories bridge political divides in this time of strife. People from all over the political spectrum engage in more civil conversations around solutions than they do just about any other climate story, including in feedback and engagement with the story’s author.

And I can assure you as journalists and writers, we do want to hear meaningful feedback and engagement because often that helps us guide our future stories and follow up work. So let’s dive into how to cover these climate solutions. Once again, climate and journalism can be complicated, but solutions journalism is an integral part of it and it’s one of the three pillars that Covering Climate Now considers key. If you were in our last basic session, you know what we’re actually talking about. Once again, humanize, localize, solutionize. We keep coming to this because it is the core tenets of effective climate journalism and effective journalism. Full stop. So when you decide to cover or happen to get assigned a solution story, you don’t really have to do anything different than you would with any other climate story or really just about any story at all.

However, let’s go ahead and review some of the basic steps in the pitfalls to do excellent solutions’ journalism from the very start. It may be helpful to dive in first to see what solutions journalism is not and what it is. Solutions journalism is not advocacy or activism, neither is it cheerleading or sugarcoating. Good solutions journalism is evidence-based and interrogates solutions exploring which ones work and which ones certainly don’t. That’s vital information not only for your readers, for the public, but also for policy makers alike as they decide about decisions about how to best deal with this climate crisis, not only on the local level but also on larger levels as well. Solutions journalism is also not exclusively tech or energy reporting, even though some might think of it that way.

Solutions are not just technological as Santiago put it before. Solar panels are a part of that, but there’s a larger scale to that. And solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars, and other cleaner green technology is important, yes, but it’s just part of the picture. Another part, and I would argue even larger than the technology, lies in social and political action of which there are also solutions to be reported. Again, also critically, remember, there’s no silver bullets, no one-stop solutions, no singular thing that’s going to save the world and save all of us along with it. Investigating, questioning, and being skeptical about climate solutions is just like investigating, questioning, and being skeptical about the other area of journalism.

And I know many of you are aware to do this, it’s just good journalism. However, in the case of climate solutions, disinformation and misinformation is especially abundant, so this is even more important. So let’s kind of take a look at some of the main types of disinformation that you’ll likely encounter when you cover solutions. The first one is a negative one and it’s fairly common. It will tell you that solutions don’t exist or it’s not enough, and this is simply not true. Science confirms that we still have all the solutions that we need in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. What has been lacking is the political willpower to do so. The second one will also tell you that solutions are bad.

Solar panels produce cancer, that electric cars can catch fire easily and they’re really hard to put out. So why would you even do that, or windmills kill whales. Now this doesn’t mean that all solutions are good per se, but remember you have to investigate and question everything. The third one, we’ll tell you once again, this one climate solution in particular is perfect. It’s going to be the thing that we need and everything else is now irrelevant. This is very common among supporters of geoengineering, whether it’s cloud seeding, whether it’s adjusting the chemistry in our atmosphere, whether it’s putting mirrors in space. As a meteorologist, I can tell you that the scale of these is not feasible, it’s not true.

No solution is the solution and we need a combination of all of them, especially when it comes to timing. As Santiago put, sure, maybe there are solutions that will vastly help us, but maybe the technology and the scale of that is several years down the line. We have to think of things to get us there beforehand. And finally, the last one will exaggerate something that makes it seem like something is not a solution, appear as a solution. We call this greenwashing. It’s things that appear green when in fact they’re not exactly. We have a lot more information on how to identify and combat greenwashing on our website. It is a vast subject, it is a pervasive subject that we certainly see, especially in advertising and PR.

So be aware of how to identify it and also be aware of how to combat it. Once again, your job as a journalist is to identify solutions, question them, gather what evidence of what works and what doesn’t, and then confirm that they’re not selling you exaggerations or lies. Could do this by finding their pros and cons and then all together report everything accurately. This is a lot and it’s definitely what I would consider not sugarcoating and it may seem daunting, but once again, this is nothing from what you’ve already done in any other field of journalism. However, since this is a training session, we’re going to go ahead and break down how to cover some climate solutions. And this is really great information.

We’re going to start a little bit with the abstract and then go into more questions that are really going to help you nail down how to cover these climate solutions. This is some recommendations coming to you from our friends at the Solutions Journalism Network. We’ll just call it SJN. And they propose a four point approach. This proposal, which we think is some of the best out there, ensures a consistent, critical, and exhaustive coverage of any solutions focused story. So let’s go ahead and take a look at their thesis. Number one, a solutions’ story focuses on a response to a social problem, not just a person or an organization and how that response has worked and why it has or why it hasn’t. The best solutions reporting distills the information and the lessons that make the response relevant and accessible to others.

In other words, it offers insight. That’s number two. Number three, solutions journalism looks for evidence, data, or qualitative results that show effectiveness or once again, lack thereof. Solutions stories are really upfront with the audience about what evidence there is, what it tells us and what it doesn’t. A particularly innovative response can be a good story even without much evidence, but the reporter has to be transparent about the lack thereof and why the response is noteworthy anyway. It’s a little bit of a nuanced take, but we do have to examine it. And once again, that’s looking for evidence. And finally, solution stories reveal a response’s shortcomings, no response is perfect and some work well for one community but may fail in others.

A responsible reporter covers what doesn’t work about it and places the response in context. In other words, reporting on limitations and that is essential. So once again, four main things. Look at the response, the evidence, the limitations, and the insights. I’m going to send it back over to Santiago to go back into what we can look at and what questions to ask as we go into more climate solutions.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: Thank you David. And yes, don’t forget that you have the Q&A function down there. If you have any questions, any suggestions, you have it at the bottom of your screen. So all right, let’s look at these four points. This is kind of abstract a bit. Let’s see how we can ground it and make it more practical, something that we can see. And we’re going to see an example right after this. So it’s going to be very, very easy. To find out the response, we can ask what is the solution being put forward? Check this out. I’m not asking, what is a company that is putting it out? I’m not saying any of that. I’m looking at the solution and I’m going to see how has it worked or how hasn’t it worked. And 99% of the time, that’s going to be a gray zone.

It works sometimes and it doesn’t some other times and you have to look at that gray zone and report it. Now you do that, but you don’t do it based on whatever the owner of the solution tells you or the company putting it out. You look at the evidence. What is the evidence? Well, you can have data, but you can have empirical evidence on the ground that you’re reporting and it’s indicating to you whether the solution is or not effective and how effective. And very, very important here, has this solution been effective for the communities that are most affected by the climate crisis? Because a solution that only works for the rich and the powerful is not really a climate solution.

What insights and information from this story could help other stakeholders better respond to the problem? So it’s not just the solution that we are exploring the response to the problem, is how is this response being implemented? In what context? So if somebody else would like to use this solution, they can take those learnings and take an extra step, a step further. And so those are insights and we’re going to see with that we have a great example in a second. The last question here is what are the limitations? What are the shortcomings? There’s always limitations, there’s always shortcomings, there’s always a problem at the very least. And reporting those is very, very important. But it’s also important to investigate how can we overcome this problem.

Is there any solution to the solution? And so on. Let’s see this example that I keep talking and talking about. This one we’ve taken again directly from SJN Story Tracker. Actually, Story Tracker is a great resource that you can get to get some inspiration on some very, very good solution stories. I think David’s going to share the link with you to the tracker in a second, but in any case, you’re going to have all this in your email in a few hours after we finish this conversation. All right, so this story for those of you who are not reading the screen right now, I’ll read the headline: “Planting the Future: How a Nigerian University is Tackling Food Insecurity with Agricultural Innovation.” This is from a publication called Nigeria Health Watch.

For those of you who are on a laptop right now and are comfortable with this and can keep following up, I would recommend that you open this story. It’s a really short story. It has around five, six hundred words and just follow with me with the different parts I’m going to be mentioning. I’m not going to share my screen because I would be too messy. For those of you who can’t right now who are on your phone or are driving or just can’t open the story right now, don’t worry because we’re going to send you the link anyway. You can check it out later. So here we see how they report first the solution proposed. This is providing farmers in northern Nigeria, which is as the rest of the Sahel, one of the most vulnerable areas of the world to climate impacts.

And the scientists in the university are providing these farmers with access to advanced crops that are more resistant to drought. We’re talking specifically millet in this case. This addresses a social problem as we’ve seen that is an important part, caused by climate change, which is, well, drought is affecting the amount of nutrients that these farmers and their families and their communities are consuming and therefore it’s addressing malnutrition caused by climate change in those arid regions of the Sahel in Africa. Of course these are vulnerable communities to climate change. So we have also hit that point there.

The story goes also beyond this particular technological advance, these advanced crops. That is already good, but let’s see what are the insights that it offers. In this story, if you scroll to the bottom to the challenges part, you’ll see that it mentions that those regions, the implementation of this solution when accompanied by education campaigns where farmers would adopt these technologies much better. So they adopted better when they are properly explained what they do and how they are and they’re demonstrated in front of them. So these are the insights. Other people, other groups, other communities adopting the solution already know that they should also include education campaigns along with these crops.

In terms of data, well we don’t have a lot of numbers in this story. We do have one very important one that these millet crops offer 25% better yields than their traditional ones, but we have a lot of empirical and expert quotes that you can take as data as well. And finally, there’s a whole section on challenges. If you are scrolling right now on the story, you’ll see one third of the story is about the challenges and the limitations and how to overcome them. So this is a very straightforward, it’s uplifting, it is really a positive story, but it’s not the solution to all hunger in the world story. This is a solution that acknowledges the limitations that it entails.

And this is very important because through reporting on the limitations, not only we make it easier to overcome them, but we also gain the trust of our audiences that are understanding that we’re not selling them anything. That we are reporting on something that is down to earth. Now finally, we’re going to dive into the different categories and some more solution journalism examples that we have here. But remember before we go there that this is not a marathon. What we have just shared with you, this solution journalism network recommendations and questions and so on are a guideline. They’re a compass. They are not the template that you have to fill in all your stories.

Do it when you can and when it makes sense. These are not a hundred speed runs that you have to clock every time. It’s a marathon. And the important thing is that when you can, bring solutions to the front. Mention solutions even in the stories that are not focused on solutions. Mention solutions on the stories that are about the day after coverage of a flood and what can be done to avoid these floods to happen in the future, both for adaptation and for mitigation. Don’t forget about that. And solutions stories are great. So try your best to do one story once in a while and little by little do much more because actually this is what your audience is demanding as David was mentioning before. And we see these across the board all over the world.

Actually there’s a piece of science that we are looking a lot at these days that says that 89% of the world’s population is demanding more climate action from the government. That’s nine out of 10 people across, I think it’s more than a hundred countries in this study. So this is a significant study and it’s a very, very important thing to do and government should be working on the solution. So this is something that people want and this is something that we should be reporting on. Now, as we said at the beginning, solutions are not just technology, we’re not just talking about solar panels here. We can find solutions in almost any beat that you’re covering within the climate sphere. Let’s see a few.

We’ve taken this from the Covering Climate Now Guide to Climate Solutions, which you can find again for free on our website like all the rest of our resources, it’s available in English and in Spanish and I’m just going to summarize a bit of this, but you can find way more information in that guide along with many more examples. So let’s start with politics and government. So politics and government contain arguably the most important solution stories because government policies are probably the biggest driver of either climate change or the way to stop climate change because they just shape those laws, those regulations, the taxes, everything else that guide the structure, the attitudes of the private sector, be it companies or the civil society.

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, governments must set these conditions real quick. We must set these conditions to facilitate the phase out of fossil fuels and also stop deforestation, promote renewable energy, promote climate-friendly agriculture practice, and all while helping adapt, especially peoples and communities who are more affected. These efforts again happen at every level of government from the global to the local. So you need to look at all of those. Equally important, and also kind of halfway between this category and civil society are the civic actions that influence this government. This can be voting, lobbying, joining activist groups, organizing protests.

All these can be solution stories. Solutions reporting should then highlight these stories, but also the blocks that they find. If governments are not taking the action that people are requesting, why is that? Where are the blocks? These are also important stories to report. Yes. Let’s see one example of this, it’s a bit old but we think not that old. It’s a couple of years old, but we think it’s a very illustrative one of a very obvious government solution that actually works right away. Germany’s nine-euro train ticket scheme saved 1.8 million tons of CO2 emissions. This was a scheme that was put in Germany for a period of time and as you can see, it was absolutely effective.

52 million tickets sold. I think that Germany has around 80 million people. So that’s a lot of trips within the country. Of course it’s not that everybody bought just one ticket, but you get the idea. This was very, very successful and it’s a way of reporting what governments can do to guide that reduction in emissions. Let’s see now economics and business. And I’m going to actually run a little bit. We are not going to stop at all the samples as much as I would like. We will send you all these samples in an email right away, so no worries. We’ll see them but not dwell too much. So we have a bit of time to answer questions. So the second one is economics and business.

So here we explore how consumers and companies behave and they often behave like that in response to their policies and the laws shaped by the government policies. But of course that leaves a lot of wiggle room and here we can investigate business models, investor demands, of course the imperative of growth that is associated with capitalism and journalists need to look at these factors. One particular factor that we think is quite interesting and actually sits right on the crossroads between the economics and the politics categories are carbon markets schemes, particularly carbon credits, carbon trade schemes, border levies. These are designed to reduce the emissions, but do they actually do it and do they do it in a fair way that don’t affect communities that are already quite affected?

I mean if any of you have covered carbon credits before, you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, well these schemes often end up taking land from people who are disadvantaged or who are not in a position to adapt to that change at that speed. So look at this. Also, look at corporate pledges. Companies love to say they’re green and they love this saying that they’re net-zero and sometimes it’s actually true. Sometimes they do right, but sometimes they don’t. And that’s greenwashing, as we said, exploring those and taking one from the other and saying, who’s doing right and who’s doing wrong? That is solution journalism and that is investigative solutions’ journalism, which it’s surely missed in most journalism spheres.

Net-zero claims. Explore them because again, they usually rely on carbon credits and offsets that affect communities and displace them. Let’s see an example real quick. Here’s one from the Christian Science Monitor, a partner of Covering Climate Now and it’s called “Seaweed Incorporated: As climate threatens lobster, Maine eyes new cash crop.” It’s about Maine fisher folk that are now stopping… They cannot fish as many lobster as before because lobster populations are being decimated by climate change, but they are now changing to seaweed farming and seaweed farming is not only good for them, but it’s good for the ecosystems and it’s actually a solution all across the board. In this particular case. Again, nothing is perfect, nothing works for everybody in the same way.

Let’s move on to tech real quick. We’ve talked a lot about this before. These are the most abundant when you see stories that are branded solutions stories, many times we’re talking about technological solutions and they are very, very important, specifically the ones that talk about renewable energy because they replace or they should replace fossil fuels and therefore mitigate climate change. But remember, explore this, investigate technology can be sometimes daunting and it moves real quick, but just question all the solutions that get presented. In this case, we want to recommend a really, really useful resource for journalists and is the list that the nonprofit Project Drawdown maintains.

This is one of the most comprehensive, scientifically solid list of currently available, financially viable and scalable solutions. And they keep this list really up to date. Actually they are launching some new products and a new guide this month or the next. So keep track of what they do because they do fantastic work. An example of a tech story that is not a straightforward tech story is about floating solar farms. This is a story that is reported from Portugal and it addresses one of the shortcomings of solar farms. Solar farms require a lot of land. Well, in Portugal, which is a country with a lot of dams and reservoirs, is starting to set floating solar farms. Again it is from three years ago, but still very, very relevant.

And let’s go just for the last two sections. Civil society. What we’re talking about when we talk civil society are schools, faith groups, religious institutions, NGOs, community groups, unions, also the media and they play a vital role in shaping climate action because they influence governments and businesses. Climate activists in particular are excellent newsmakers. Ask them what they’re doing and follow what they do. You are not becoming an activist by covering activism in the same way that if you cover the Olympics, you’re not going to become an athlete. Just treat them as they are, newsmakers. Treat them as you treat any other newsmaker with questions and with critical insight. But they know a lot about this stuff and they are excellent sources for you.

Solutions coverage should also assess how realistic these activist strategies are and think that the strategies that activists propose not always are expected to work the next day. They reflect a theory of change that can be really short term or very long term. So ask them about that. Here’s a story. This one doesn’t need a lot of explanation. I think it’s quite straightforward. Trump is just getting started. What are climate activists supposed to do? They’re literally going to ask them about that. This is in Grist and actually it’s from last week, so I’m compensating for all the old stories that I shared before. Finally, the last one and I have one more minute so I’m going to go real quick. Culture.

We’re talking here about anything that shapes people’s thoughts, people’s feelings, and inspires them to action. We’re talking about artists like graphic artists, sports figures. We’re talking about comedians, we’re talking about writers, we’re talking about filmmakers. All these people are bringing attention to climate change through music, movies, TV shows, documentaries, visual arts. All this stuff is also newsmaking or has the potential to be newsmaking and also your coverage helps reach other audiences that are interested in these topics and not necessarily on the scientific part of climate. So this is a way to connect with audiences that may not have been so receptive before.

Here’s a sample. This is the only one that is behind paywall and I really apologize for that. All the others we have put a lot of effort in bringing you only freely available samples, but this one was so good that I couldn’t resist bringing it up. This is about the LA fires and it’s about artists that have been painting Los Angeles on fire for years. Now this has happened for real and it’s a feature on these people. All right, I talked a lot and I talked real quick, so I am really grateful for you to standing with me until this point. Before we move on to the questions and answers, I want to tell you one last thing. The work you do, good climate journalism is a key solution.

It’s not just another climate solution, is a key, a keystone of all climate solutions because if people don’t know what’s going on, if people don’t know what solutions are available, but also what the problem is and who is behind these problems because there are people with names and last names behind these problems, then all the rest kind of falls apart. All the rest is disconnected and people cannot understand the magnitude of the problem that we are facing and how available solutions really are. They are on our hand and we can just use them at any time. Your role then is key here, and your audiences demand it. And now I will shut up, promise, and let David and Mark take the first questions because I’ve talked a lot.

David Dickson: Give yourself a little second to speak. I want to talk about this first question coming to you from Christopher Johnson. It’s a good question and I think we have some thoughts about it: “Would you agree that an overlooked area of climate solutions is improving energy efficiency and the retrofitting of buildings?” It’s an interesting solution and it’s not exactly, I guess, retrofitting, but one thing that we are seeing a lot of coverage on, especially within the past year or so has been heat pumps. Heat pumps is a huge area that we’re seeing a lot of stories and a lot of development on. I think now it’s the third or second year in a row that heat pumps actually have outsold regular heating elements for your house both in the United States and I believe globally as well.

And I see in the chat it says these aren’t sexy solutions. I will push back on that because if you look and I’ll provide a resource that will help you kind of explain this type of solution. People love these sorts of things and they even made a slow jam it to an R&B song. So definitely look into it but also look into those other things as well, such as the improving energy efficiency of older buildings and the retrofitting of buildings as well because that is a huge aspect of our energy output and burning of fossil fuels comes from residential heating and cooling of our houses.

Mark Hertsgaard: David, let me jump in here as well. I’m so glad that Christopher Johnson raised this. I would say that increasing energy efficiency and indeed resource efficiency, water efficiency, building efficiency, it is the most overlooked solution to not just climate change but to a lot of our environmental problems. And let me point you in particular to the work of RMI, used to be known as Rocky Mountain Institute. They’re based in Colorado, but they work all over the world. They work with governments, they work with businesses, they work with nonprofits. And their emeritus is a man named Amory Lovins who has been really the main intellect behind all of this work on efficiency for decades now. And it is far more valuable, efficiency, than most of the other solutions that are out there.

And the core of it is that when you are more efficient, you don’t need as much energy in the first place, right? You don’t need as much water in the first place. And so the cleanest and the safest energy is the energy you never have to produce in the first place because you’re not wasting it. And I agree also with my colleague David. These are in fact sexy stories. You just have to learn how to tell them. Believe me, everybody likes the idea of saving gobs of money and that’s what you do when you invest in energy efficiency. There’s a book that Lovins did called Factor Four. There’s another book called Cool Companies. Those are relatively older books by Joe Romm. And in Romm’s book he talks about some of the biggest companies in the world who are increasing their profit margins by 10 and 20%.

That’s a lot more than you can get in anything legal by investing in energy and water efficiency. So it’s a huge opportunity, very much overlooked and I think you’ll find, as David said, a lot of people really interested in it.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: Let me take that second question from Noella Budar. They said that, “You’ve said solutions journalism is not activism, but also that 89% of the population are craving solutions. Would you please say a little more about what to avoid that may come across as activism, but how to highlight that a story contains solutions for audiences that are craving such kinds of stories?” Well, I think in this case, reflecting on those pillars from the solutions journalism network is a good starting point. Doesn’t need to be right for every single story, but it’s a very, very good starting point, is to keep in mind no solution is perfect. So I wouldn’t start by headlining my story, “Here’s the solution to climate change. Planting 1 trillion trees,” or something.

That actually has been a headline and a very wrong one, so I wouldn’t start with that. That is what I think comes across as activism. I would go more as if activists are involved in the story naming them as any other news make. If you are covering the Olympics, then you would say whatever athlete won the medal gold, here you can say, “Well, this solution proposed by these activists is doing this and is working like this.” We’re not going to go and say this solution that has never been tested or tried is going to save us. That is not the way and that’s what sounds as activism like we are trying to sell or propose a solution. We’re not doing that. We’re saying this solution that is already being implemented or that has a very, very solid science behind it works like this and this and this and can be implemented like that.

And most importantly has this limitation and this other and this other. The story about the millet crops in Nigeria, I think, does this fantastically, if you want to have a look. I don’t know if I answered your question completely, but I want to leave a couple more minutes for the other questions.

Mark Hertsgaard: Let me jump in quickly on the 89% because I’ve had this pushback from a number of colleagues that somehow the 89% project sounds like activism. It is not activism to report a profound and under explored political fact that 89% of the world population wants their governments to do more. That’s the phrase in the survey question. To do more to deal with climate change. That is a political fact and it’s a different fact in every country. You can look at the study. We wrote about it last week in our newsletter Climate Beat. For example, here in my home country, the United States, the figure is not 89%, it’s 74%. In India, the figure is 80% of the people want their government to do more. That is simply a political fact. In the same way that we can say that in the United States, Donald Trump is now the president because he won the electoral college majority.

That’s a fact. That’s not carrying water for Donald Trump to report that. Then the second part of our 89% project will however ask politicians, well, why aren’t you delivering on what your constituents say they want? Why aren’t you delivering that kind of climate action? Again, that is not activism, that is accountability journalism. Our role as journalists is twofold. We’re supposed to inform the people so that they can make informed choices about their leaders and we are supposed to hold leaders to account, asking them the questions that they don’t want to necessarily answer on their own. And so the idea that this is somehow activism is simply wrong. Don’t let people intimidate you that way. That is a profound misunderstanding of what we’re doing here as journalists.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: Thanks, Mark. All right, there are a few more questions. We’re not going to be able to do all of them. There’s a question about Nepal. I am really sorry we cannot give you that kind of knowledge here right now. I would suggest that you talk to your local experts, talk to scientists that are based in Nepal or has studied and researched climate change and its solutions in Nepal. I’m sorry, I would love to give you this answer, but I would be going way beyond my knowledge.

Mark Hertsgaard: I’ll give an answer. I’ve actually been there and so one of the things that is really dangerous in Nepal and actually one of our award winners at Covering Climate Now did a story on this a couple of years ago. What’s happening as the Himalaya Mountains are melting, as the ice is melting, you’re having landslides because the ice has been in place for years and there’s things that are called glacial lakes and those lakes are melting and creating terrible landslides that can destroy whole villages. The Nepalese government wants to do something about it. They’re trying to get international support, but it’s not been coming. That there again is a real solution story to dig into.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: We’re going to have to leave it there. There’s a couple more questions, but I’m sorry we are at the top of the hour and it’s time to let you go. Thank you so much again for sticking with us till the very end, for joining us today for this CCNow Basics webinar. We do these webinars every quarter, so keep track of them by signing up to our newsletters and following our social media accounts. Remember, you will receive all the materials that we’ve talked about. All the links are there in the chat and many more. You will receive an email in a couple of hours, so check your inboxes. You don’t need to be copying and saving everything right now.

You’ll receive everything there. In that email also, there is something very important. There is a survey. It’s very short. You can reply in two minutes and it helps us immensely. Actually, the topic and the time zones of this call was set by the people who answered the previous survey, so just shape whatever you want to see from us and we will try our best to bring it to you. Thank you so much everyone, and thank you so much for your commitment to excellent climate journalism. Bye-bye.