CCNow Basics – The Three Pillars

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Welcome to this training session with Covering Climate Now. I’m Mark Hertsgaard, one of the founders of Covering Climate Now, and we are an organization for those of you who may not know, we are organized by journalists, for journalists. That means that we are not a group that has government officials, we don’t have activists, we don’t have any of those people, no flacks, no nothing. This is just journalists talking among ourselves about how all of us can do a better job of covering what we at Covering Climate Now consider the story of our time.

So for people to come in here today, as I say, we’re organized by journalists, for journalists, we’re five years old. We were founded by the Nation Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review. And if you or your news outlet are not already part of Covering Climate Now, you are warmly welcome and invited to join us. It costs nothing. All of our services are provided for free and there’s a great many of these services.

Today’s training is just one example of the many things that we provide. We also do… Pardon me. We have trained literally hundreds of fellow journalists from across the United States and around the world. And I want to emphasize that, although we’re based in the United States, Covering Climate Now has partners literally all over the world from about 50 other countries. And together these 500-plus partners reach literally billions of people every day. So it’s an opportunity for you as a journalist to connect with your colleagues both here and around the world and share insights, share frustrations, all the different things that go into doing daily reporting.

We like to say here at Covering Climate Now, although we are as journalists […] not always paid great. We’re paid by […] to help the public understand the climate emergency and its many solutions and to hold power to account, and, of course, here in my own home country of the United States, that is a very, very active consideration right now as we are just a few days out from an election that is going to be faithful on many fronts including the climate front.

I’m going to leave it there because I gather that there may be a little bit of transmission problem on my end. So I’m going to leave it there and turn it over to my colleagues who will take us through the rest of this training session. But thank you all very much for being here. It’s so important that, as journalists, that we stay on this story and we at Covering Climate Now are here to help. So thanks very much.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: Thank you so much, Mark. And I’ll pick it up from here. Hopefully my connection is all right. My name is Santiago Sáez. I’m the director of training here at Covering Climate Now, and I’m joined today by my colleague, David Dickson, who’s our TV engagement coordinator and our home meteorologist and our all-around science guy. So before we proceed, let’s take a second. Let me just run the slides real quick. There we go. There we go. You should be seeing my slides now.

Okay. So, I am supposed to be able to see you, but I am not being able to see you. All right, so let me run the slide without the presentation because it’s not working how it should be. So before we proceed, let’s take a second to acknowledge how important this moment is. This session is a training session that is aimed to early career journalists.

Everybody’s welcome, of course, and I know we have lots of senior journalists here as well, people who are maybe refreshing the basics, but it’s very, very important I think for people who are studying to calibrate your compasses at the beginning of this story, to set sail towards this story, which is the most important, the most defining of our generations. And I say that in plural purpose. There’s people from different generations here and it will affect several of our generations and it will define how we live in this planet. This is not an easy task. Of course, those of you who have been on this for a while, you already know, but really nothing is in journalism. So you keep your eyes on the ball, but don’t forget to be kind to yourselves. This can be sometimes a big story and keep your eyes on and be kind to your colleagues as well.

And remember that you’re not alone. We are here for you as well, as Mark was mentioning. And many of us are on this as well, many other like-minded organizations. So now let’s move on to the reason why this issue deserves our undivided attention. Actually, it’s a reason why we’re here at all. And I’m not talking about this training session, I’m talking about the reason why we are in our newsrooms or we’re in our streets, how we are in our institutions and how we report. And that reason is our audience. Because, of course, as journalists, it doesn’t really matter what I tell you. I can come with lots of trainings, lots of lessons and lots of my own experience, but you will in the end listen to your audience.

And in this case specifically when we talk about climate, they’re just not spectators. They’re not just looking at you. They are our own communities. They are participants in this whole story, in this narrative of climate change. So when you tell the story of climate change, you really are telling their story, the story of your audience, and they’re looking at us to help them clarify, to help them understand this story, to help them, show them how to take action and to give them information that inspires and that empowers them.

Yes, you heard me right. This is something that maybe some more senior colleagues here in this session today will come as a surprise to them. But yes, audiences are demanding climate news. This is something we know. This is something we have experienced anecdotally and we have lots of data and I’m going to show you a bit of this data now.

David Dickson: Sounds good.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: I’m sorry? Yes.

David Dickson: I’m going to go ahead and run the slides. I can pull them in full for you.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: Sounds good. Thank you, David. All right, so I’ll let David run the slides. Yeah, that’s better. I’m really sorry. I did a test before and it was working, but now it was not working anymore. Things that happened. Anyway, here’s some numbers brought to us by our friends at the Yale Climate Communications, which is as Mark usually says, the gold standard on polling for climate change and climate change perception around the world.

This is the data that indicates that the majority of our audiences across the whole world, and this is just the top 15 emitters except for China and Russia and Iran who didn’t contribute data to this study. But this same study, which we are going to post the link here in the chat, has data for many, many more countries. I’m going to see a few more in a second. So basically this data indicates that the majority of our audiences around the world believe that global warming is not just real, but a pressing concern. Even in the most polarized of these countries at the bottom of this list such as Indonesia, Germany, Australia, the US, et cetera, even in these countries that are more polarized, we have less positive in the sense of people understanding and believing the science. Responses, even in those countries, we see a clear majority of people that are either alarmed or concerned about climate change.

Those who dismiss climate change, the ones on the right side of this graph, very rarely go over 10% in any territory. There’s a few of them, but not a lot. And this is not just passive acknowledgement. Now this is a clear demand. Can we move to the next slide, please?

Yes, a clear majority of respondents in over three-quarters of the world’s region identify climate change as a personally important issue. Here you have the map. The red ones are the ones who consider it a personal or personal issue. The blue ones are the ones that don’t. Let me repeat that word because I think it’s a very important one.

Personal. This is personal. This is about their homes, this is about their communities, this is about their families and their people in the future that we’re talking about here. And of course, they’re interested in the story that is personal. And of course, they demand information that is accurate, that is abundant, and that is clear about it.

So yes, the data here, data is loud and clear. People want to hear about climate change. So then why do we keep hearing that climate news are a turnoff? Why do we keep hearing this? Well, on one side that’s really a myth. This is data from our friends at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network and Reuters Institute. And as you can see, news avoidance is not more worrying for climate news than it is for news in general in any of these surveyed countries, which cover quite a big part of the world’s population. You can see that, in general, climate news are not a turnoff or at least not more a turnoff than any other news.

So on one side, this is a myth that climate news are a turnoff. And the other reason is that honestly we as journalists could be doing a better job at portraying this story.

We have been telling good stories sometimes, but not often the whole thing. We have been doing a pretty good job covering impacts, for example, that some of our colleagues are doing a great job at that. We have been doing a pretty good job at covering the science of climate change. We are pretty good at reporting from COPs and from any other summit and the G20 and so on and the climate week in New York. But we are failing as a group. Of course, there’s lots of good examples of people and we’re going to go over some of them now. But we are collectively failing at a crucial part of the story in the solutions. Let me quote directly from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report from January last year, which is based on a global survey of editors and news directors. And this is a quote, okay? I’m going to be reading from here.

“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. Digital News Report data show that this selective avoidance has doubled in some countries since 2017 because,” and here’s the important part, “Many people feel that media coverage is overly negative, repetitive, hard to trust, and leaves people feeling powerless.” This is a direct quote. So here’s the data from that same report.

As you can see, solutions journalism is almost at the top of the proposed ways to counter these news avoidances. This is not just for climate, this is for every type of news. This is in line with the overwhelming evidence that we see anecdotally ourselves in our daily work, but also our partners that report to us and who we talk with on a daily basis that report this fact: climate stories that contain solutions just get more engagement and enable conversations across polarized divides.

More people are more willing to engage in a civil conversation across the political spectrum when the story contains solutions or is focused on solutions. They work better across the board. This is a fact. But what I wanted to highlight here is not just that, but check that out in this same slide. Solution stories are almost at the top. And if you go to the bottom, you will see positive stories and inspirational stories. So yes, solutions journalism is not necessarily positive journalism, it’s not necessarily always good news. It’s definitely not advocacy for any kind of solution. It’s not activism, it’s not cheerleading, it’s not sugarcoating, it is reporting the problem, but also its potential solutions.

All right. We’re going to go over this at the end. We’re going to see how to do this, but just let me know before we move on, that good solutions journalism is evidence-based and it interrogates the solutions.

All right? It explores which ones work, which ones don’t, and explores which ones are fair and which ones aren’t, and all this stuff. This is vital information for your audience. It’s vital information also for policymakers as they make decisions about dealing with the climate crisis. And we are going to tell you again how to do this later in this session. But first I wanted to clear this up because this is a mistake that I’ve made myself in my own career of not reporting solutions, of thinking this is cheerleading and so on. So I didn’t want to turn anybody off. So yes.

Anyway, we have three pillars. We just seem to be talking about one pillar, but this session is called The Three Pillars and it’s called that for a reason. Solutions are important indeed, but we should always try to include them in our climate stories. But there are two more: localizing and humanizing our stories. And yes, a good climate story, it’s a story that localizes climate change, humanizes climate change, and solutionizes climate change. And we know that’s not a word, but we need one that rhymed to make it catchy. So I’m sorry for that.

These stories that do these three things are often going to work better with audiences anywhere in the world. This means that the story that reports on polar bears or gives us a bunch of numbers and scientific terms that are hard to understand or people or a story that leaves us hopeless and powerless, these are stories that don’t work as well. This seems straightforward. And you may be sitting now in your office or in your home and looking at me and saying, “Well, yeah, not a surprise.” But hey, I get into these pitfalls all the time and I read stories that get into these pitfalls all the time.

So honestly, it’s good to go back to these basics, especially if you’re starting your career, get into this framework, get into this mindset when you are thinking how to focus on a story. This doesn’t mean that every single story has to hit everything. That’s very rare and that’s not our recommendation. Our recommendation is that you think about this and that along your body of work, when you are putting together all your stories that you’ve done in the last few weeks, months, then you have been hitting these three pillars.

Let’s go now very quickly over each of them. Let’s see what we mean by each of them and then we’ll go in detail and with examples. So first localize. It’s human nature. And this is something that data also supports that people care the most about what’s happening nearby, what’s happening in their local area, what’s happened to the people they know in their communities. And the climate story is happening there. The climate story is playing out in every local community in the world. If you find those expressions of climate change, if you find how the climate story is happening, then you can go wrong telling that story to those people.

Second, humanize, and this is also human nature and is also based in data, but people care most about stuff that is happening to other people. That’s why the polar bear became a meme in the climate journalism sphere because it didn’t tell stories about humans.

So when you tell a climate story, don’t get bogged down in the science, don’t get into the whole numbers and everything else, but find those individuals, find those people who are going to tell their story and their feelings about it. And that way you can illuminate those facts that in the end is what you’re trying to portray.

And finally, again, solutionize. It’s human nature again to want to hear good stories, good angles, feel empowered to feel that there’s something to be done, even to get angry because something is not being done. That’s also solutions journalism. There’s no getting around the fact that also that climate change, and for those of you who’ve been in this beat for a while, know it is out of bad news. We get exposed to a lot of stuff that is not very happy. But hey, there’s hope. And this is also based on science, and if we follow the science for one thing, we should also follow the science for that.

All right, that’s a lot. And it’s true that when I give this introduction to this session, it can be a bit overwhelming. It can feel that, oh wow, this is complex. This story is very far-reaching. It has lots of connections. I have to portray the science, but also have to do with local and also have to give solutions. And yes, this is complex, but let me tell you something that probably is going to resonate with a lot of you. If you’ve been doing journalism for at least a couple of years, you have already done this. And yes, in fact you have already rose to a similar challenge when you covered COVID and many, many of us did this.

Think back at the beginning of 2020, 2021, 2022, the height of the pandemic.

Remember how every story we did. And it could be about politics, it could be about the economy, it could be about education, you name it, about any… It doesn’t matter what beat you’re in, but everything seemed to have a COVID connection, right? We were highlighting every story in the context of COVID. And we were talking about the human suffering. Yes, we were talking about the impacts of COVID, but we didn’t stop covering the solutions from day one. We talked about masks, we talked about physical distancing, we talked about vaccinations, we talked about everything that scientists were telling us that could help us go over that crisis. So we can do much the same with climate change. And the most important part, and this is something that Mark here always tell us to highlight and it’s absolutely true, is that we play this story big, that remember during the pandemic, most museums around the world, big, small, corporate, independent, it doesn’t matter, everybody was doing daily stories about COVID, sometimes more than one, often more than one, especially at the height.

And this is a message. The amount, the volume of stories that we send is a message to our consumers, to our audiences that something big, that something important and something crucial is happening and that they should be paying attention. Even somebody who never watched the news knew that something big was going on. There was no news avoidance possible there. Well, we advocate for something like that to be done with climate change. We’re not going to tell you how to do a job. We’re going to tell you that this is an important story. And according to science, even more important, even more crucial than COVID was, and that was a lot of suffering. For those of us who suffered directly in our families and our communities, we know how bad that was. Well, this unfortunately can be worse.

Now, okay, let’s take a moment. Sit down, look back.

We know what we need to do, that is playing the story big, touching these three pillars and so on. We know why we need to do it because our audiences demand it and it doesn’t matter what else I tell you, and we know that we can do it. But now I would like to pass the microphone to David here because this is after all a training session and I want to focus on how to do this. And we’re going to go really, really practical now. So thank you so much for standing with me for this very long introduction. I didn’t want it to be so long. But yeah, and I’ll pass it on to David now. Take it on, David.

David Dickson: Thank you so much and thank you all again for joining us here today. We understand that this is a big issue and a big story and we hope that you all treat it the same way. And as he said, this is a training session. So we do encourage you to continue using that Q&A function at the bottom of your screen to ask questions. We’re here to assist you. See Covering Climate Now as a resource that we can help you improve wherever you are on your climate reporting journey. If you’re just starting off or you’re an experienced journalist, we’re happy to help. So let’s start off with this first pillar.

As Santiago explained, it’s humanizing and as reporters, as journalists, as meteorologists like myself, we do this every day, not even in just climate reporting. It’s a fact for stories on every beat: we talk about the economy, politics or salmon fishing in the Arctic. It’s always the same.

Human stories work better because we care about others and ourselves. However, this is particularly true with climate change, which often can be a big, scary, even amorphous sort of topic. I understand that even just looking at this topic, you might be struggling to ask yourselves, “Well, where do I start?” And we recommend starting with the human, starting with the stories, starting with the human suffering, starting with the emotions because those stories we found, and the data supported this, really does resonate with your audience. So to humanize a story means to dive deeper. It means to listen, to not just gather quotes, but also about engagement, understanding the practical, but also the emotional implications of climate change on people’s lives. Because the data supports this, and we’ll drop it in the chat a little bit later, at least in the US a majority of people are at least somewhat concerned about climate change and 10% have feelings that could be categorized as climate anxiety.

And there has been many studies done across the world which shows that significant populations do harbor some of this climate anxiety or eco-anxiety, particularly in younger populations. So keep that in mind that these people whose stories we’re trying to tell, often they can’t place their emotions or their story in the context of a global phenomenon or something as large as climate change. And that’s our job as journalists, as well as reporters and really in the entire newsrooms. So once again, we recommend to start with the human. Whenever it really doesn’t feel forced, center your stories around a person, not an abstract-related climate headline. Now those are good stories at times and they need to be told, those recent studies or statistics, but the visual medium that we offer in TV, in print, in digital offers great opportunities to highlight the human suffering, emotions. And we’ll see a few examples in just a moment because emotions are a huge part of our human existence.

We’re emotional and emotions are what makes us connect with other people. So don’t ask just for numbers, ask for feelings, highlight these feelings. And it’s important to note that when you are asking people, for example, in the aftermath of an extreme weather event and the devastation that causes this. In the southeast United States, we know that we had been ravaged by two hurricanes, tropical cyclones within the past month or so. When you’re highlighting and telling these people stories, many of them on their worst possible days, be sure to follow up. It’s not a great look for us as newsrooms and as reporters to show up and tell people’s most personal stories at potentially their lowest point of their lives, only to never see them again.

And also by definition, climate change is an ongoing story. Revisit communities and individuals to show how they’re faring in the face of ongoing challenges.

One example I like to say is there was a story recently talking about home insurance. Home insurance is a huge issue, especially with climate change where companies are pulling out and there’s recent stories that highlight the journey to find that home insurance yet again. And then finally, find relatable scenarios. Often, climate change can be a pretty difficult subject, especially when you’re talking about something abstract. So explain complex climate subjects and top concepts through everyday experiences. We’ll later show you some examples that do this pretty well. This is how we drive the story home.

Now, let’s take a look at just a few examples and there are so many examples to really choose from. This one is a great one, fairly recently from The Guardian. And you can see just by the headline how it plays into the human side of this heatwave. No water, no shade. Life as a roofer in the sweltering Florida heat, saying, “It feels like 120 degrees Fahrenheit.”

You could report on a heatwave with numbers, medical effects, and even just broken numbers. And all those pieces are indeed in the story, but the way of framing this heatwave works much better. You don’t even need to be in Florida or a roofer to be interested because it portrays the emotions, the feelings being on a roof in the sweltering heat in 120 degrees. Do you feel it with the words, “No water, no shade?” That’s a human experience and it hits that third point, relatable scenarios. Again, you don’t have to have everything in common with the protagonist, but you can relate to how they feel. And this is especially evident in extreme heat examples. We understand based on the science that extreme heat across the entire world is made worse and more likely due to climate change. We also understand in the US in many areas across the world, heat is the number one weather-related killer. As a result, we really do need to highlight the human aspect of this.

Let’s take a look at another example. This one is a little bit more visual with photojournalism, when we see this also in broadcasts and local TV and national TV. It’s from the European Press Agency covering wildfires in Ecuador last month. And you can see just how the feelings are being portrayed. Looking at their faces, you can feel the emotions coming from that and the distressing look of trying to save their city with buckets of water. Wildfires are not only about burnt acreage as well as economic damage, it’s also a distressing experience that we, as all humans, can relate to and that photo brings it to life.

I’m going to pass it back over to Santiago as we take a look at one of those different pillars, this one being localizing.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: Thank you so much, David. So yes, let’s move on. We have seen how to humanize the story, how to center the human. This is somehow related, but it’s looked at it from a different side. It’s like two sides of the same coin really. But let’s look at this other side of the coin. Localizing the story.

Now, another myth about climate change that we hear a lot, especially when we are starting, especially when we live in areas that haven’t received a hurricane or a wildfire in the last two years, is that yes, climate change happens, but it happens somewhere else. It happens to somebody else. It doesn’t happen here. I’m safe. Well, that is not right. It’s not that it happens just at the coast. It’s not that it happens just at the Arctic or it doesn’t happen in the rainforest. It happens in every community, it happens everywhere, it happens to everyone.

So finding those stories that are rooted in communities is crucial to deliver this message. And these are messages and these are strategies proven time and time again. They work better, audiences like them more. And again doesn’t mean that they have to read only stories about their own communities, but there are ways, and we’ve seen some in the previous pillar, like finding relatable spaces. This is something that you can do for this one as well. Doesn’t need to be in the same place, but places have things in common. We need to find those community feelings and bring them up to others. And of course, for those of you who are covering stories locally, for those of you who are embedded in your own communities, this is especially important.

So now, ways to do it: engage with local experts. If you’re covering a story about a place, try to get experts from those places to tell you their story, especially if you work for local media, of course. Why? It’s because these people can offer way more insights. These people are not just experts who are going to tell you the cold facts, these are people who live in those communities and who know how it affects their people and how it affects them personally. Of course, also, if you are a local journalist, it’s especially important because making this context with these sources will get you many more stories, many more ideas, and, of course, a lot of trust in your community.

Second point here is spotlight community action. Sorry. Spotlight and put a focus on what people are doing and what solutions are being taken and developed locally by their communities. Talk to local activists that are demanding political action, for example. Talk to local political leaders and ask them why this solution is being or not implemented. Don’t just go to always the federal or the national or the international sphere.

And this is true, even if you are talking about the international sphere, we’re going to see a fantastic example in a minute of somebody doing this really, really well talking about COP, which is the most far away thing that exists for many communities around this world. You can highlight those solutions. You can highlight the action of policymakers or their inaction. You can highlight what business leaders are doing locally. You can highlight what community groups are doing, all this stuff, and always rooting it in a community.

And finally, yeah, I’m not going to repeat the point of the visuals. It’s the same as David was mentioning before. When we talk about climate change, if we show recognizable landmarks, this touches on people’s emotions and work best. If you have also the resources, the budget in your newsroom, you can also do augmented reality time-lapse videos, stuff like that.

But of course, that’s not for everyone. Still, there are ways of doing imagery even without images. And we are going to see an example here. This is a brilliant, brilliant example. Actually, it was published in December last year. It’s by The World, which is US-based media that covers the whole world and is one of this year’s Covering Climate Now’s award winners because of how excellent it localizes. In it, this Ghanian journalist, Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman, he analyzes one of the decisions that was at that point made. It hadn’t been made, it was still debated at that time of phasing out fossil fuels and what it would mean for African nations. But it didn’t just stop at African nations or even at COP28 in Dubai. It looked at how it would affect workers in an industrial area around Ghana’s capital of Accra.

And this piece is also published as a podcast. And this is what I mean that you can do, sometimes imagery without images because it’s brilliant at that as well. This is in just one minute or one minute 20 seconds of this podcast just to give you an idea.

Podcast speaker: Here’s a story from The World. There’s momentum at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai for an agreement to phase out fossil fuels. There’s also resistance from major oil producers including Saudi Arabia. Additionally, some developing and middle income countries, including large parts of Africa, say they deserve to be able to exploit their natural resources and develop their economies just as richer countries have already done. Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman has a perspective from Ghana in West Africa.

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman: I’m here in Tema, an industrial hub with machines and chimneys releasing thick plumes of black smoke into the sky. A diesel-fueled truck has just parked along the road loaded with inorganic fertilizers. Bismark Owusu Nortey is in the passenger seat. He tells me through the window that he’s helping transport the fertilizer to Accra. He is with Ghana’s Peasant Farmers Association.

Podcast speaker: If you look at the consumption of fertilizers in Ghana, about 80% of the fertilizers that are used by farmers are the inorganic fertilizer, which is mostly made from the natural gas or other materials.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: All right, I think we can stop it there. That was absolutely brilliant. It’s talking about an international diplomacy decision, a debate. We all covered it. I was at COP last year. Most of us covered it who were covering COP. It was one of the big debates, but nobody saw it as a local story. This guy did, this colleague did. And he not only got an award, but the recognition of all of us and his story is now an example of how to do this effectively.

Of course, often it’s easier than this. Often your story, it’s actually easier to see at the community level, but you can bring that, you can do the same. It’s not so much about having the right stories, it’s about asking the right question out of that story.

And now let’s look back to solutionizing our stories. This is our third and final pillar, or it was actually the first pillar that we talked a lot already at the beginning of this session. And you already have all the data, you have seen all the numbers as well. Skip all the introduction and why this is important and let’s dive right into it.

First of all, remember that I’m not asking you to be critical. I’m not asking you to advocate for any particular solution or to be a cheerleader of solutions. No, actually, in fact, I argue that this, of the three pillars that we have, this is the one that requires the most critical and the investigative approach of the three we represented to you today.

Solutions journalists actually have to be really, really skeptical because there is a lot of disinformation and misinformation out there. You need to inquire very deeply at every step of the way. Remember something, that there are no perfect solutions. So this is one of the points in this slide, and I’m not going precisely in order, but find the shortcomings. There are no perfect solutions. There are downsides and reporting those is key to getting your audience’s trust. One of the main factors of news avoidance is precisely that our audiences are losing trust in us and they’re losing trust in us because often we are presenting the stories incomplete.

Well, telling the shortcomings of solutions is part of solutions journalism and it’s very important to keep that trust. And believe me, every solution has some shortcoming that’s not perfect. And of course, as soon as you start looking for solutions, again, you’re going to find misinformation, you’re going to find greenwashing, et cetera.

So recognizing that and being able to detangle and dismantle it, it’s very, very important. So yes, this is definitely hard hitting investigative journalism. Also, you need to keep in mind that solutions are not just technological advances. Yes, solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars, all that is very important. I’m not going to say it’s not, but they are just part of the picture. Another part, and I’d say it’s often even larger than the technical part, is our solutions are political, are social, that are community action. And these solutions also need to be reported and often they are not or they are not as reported as the technological solutions. So yes, report on the technology, but not only on that. Keep an eye for political solutions, for community solutions, for social solutions, et cetera. And often just for even habit solutions.

And again, when you report about those, don’t stop being critical.

Those solutions also have shortcomings. Also, there’s a lot of misinformation. So keep your investigative hat on when you talk about those two. Finally, remember, yeah, there’s no silver bullets here.

And of course, you also need to keep an eye, and this is the third point here, the investigative justice, you need to keep an eye on justice on whether a solution is fair and fair for all. If you need inspiration to learn about solutions, we are going to encourage you to visit our friends and our partners at Project Drawdown and Solutions Journalism Network. Both of them have lots of stories, lots of resources to inspire you and to give you ideas. And of course, Covering Climate Now has its own solutions guide that it’s at your disposal in our website and you can peruse at any moment.

So let me give you some advice actually now, cover solutions with the words of the Solutions Journalism Network who we work very closely with, their approach has four questions that you have to ask yourself when you are reporting on solutions. If you keep these four questions in mind, you often are going to be on the right track to report on solutions.

Can we see the next slide? Perfect. So the first question is what is the solution being put forward and how has that solution worked or not worked?

Second is what is the evidence? Actually this is… I put the wrong slide here. This is a very good slide though, so I’ll go over it anyway. The second… I’ll review the questions anyway. So what evidence such as underground experience empirical data indicates that this solution is effective. In particular, has it been effective for the communities more affected by the climate crisis? So not we want to find experiences and evidence that this solution works and it’s working and it’s not a projection that is going to work in 50 years. And if that is the case, you need to report that this is not working at the moment. So ask yourself that question, is this working? Is there evidence and what is that evidence and is it working for the people who are most affected?

The third question is, let’s see what insights and information can be used from the story that you’re writing can be used by the stakeholders to make decisions to respond to the problem. So try to give them that information. And finally, we already said, what are the limitations and shortcomings of these potential solution being interrogated.

Here in this slide, that… My bad, I got the wrong slide for the Solutions Journalism Network, but basically it’s the same that we were talking about before. Look for responses to a problem, not just the problem, not just a person. Don’t cheerlead on and this is that. Don’t cheerlead on a specific solution, on a specific person, or an organization, but look at how that solution responds to the problem. And that means A, talk about the problem as well. Provide the evidence of results and look at how this solution actually works and discuss its limitations.

And remember that you can find solutions angles in almost any story across the newsrooms, not only on weather, not only on energy. We have a complete guide as I was mentioning and I think it’s already there in the chat that is going to help you expand and verify and know more about everything we’ve been talking about.

And now remember as well that connecting a climate story just to the fact that reducing fossil fuel consumption around the world is already a solution. If only that, that is already great. Okay? Let’s see a couple of examples here. I love this one from Mongabay. Do carbon credits really help communities that keep forests standing? I love this one because it’s a story that interrogates a solution right away. Carbon credits, is this really a solution? And it looks at a specific way of is this helping the communities that have another solution that are keeping another solution that is fighting against deforestation?

This is a fantastic one because it precisely goes at the interrogation level and it explores… The link is going to be in the chat and you can explore it. I mean, Mongabay does great solutions journalism. The second one that I have for you is another one that is 15-Minute City Is Saving My Life. Humanizing, localizing, and solutionizing in just how many words? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight words. There you get it. You have a human saving my life, you have a local, this is going to be a community story and you have a solution, the 15-minute city. This as easy as it gets. Go about it. It is not a lot. I don’t need to go really into this. It’s going to be also in the chat. I want to save a couple of minutes to play a video that we really love and I’m going to leave David, who’s our TV guy to present it.

David Dickson: TV guy for a number of years. Put that on my resume. So yeah, this is a great example of pretty much all those three pillars. I want you to look at it pretty critically as we humanize, solutionize, and localize. This is coming to you from New York City in the United States. This is the NBC’s National Climate reporter, Chase Cain, doing a package or a piece right after some historic storms bringing a historic amount of rainfall in New York City.

Again, let’s take a look at those three pillars and let’s watch it real quick.

Chase Cain: Friday’s floods across New York City broke records again. Brooklyn got 30 days of rain in just three hours. With nearly nine inches in total, it was the wettest day ever recorded at JFK airport, flooding nearby LaGuardia and subway lines across the city.

Interviewee: And I’m really disgusted by it because you can’t even get home.

Interviewee: We’re in fear about our homes, the property, the structure.

Chase Cain: At Central Park, the three heaviest hours of rainfall ever recorded have now happened three times in just two years, Henri and Ida in 2021, and again on Friday. Across the country, there’s been a surge of days like this since 1950 and although extreme rainfall is up nationwide, it’s increasing the most in the Midwest and Northeast and that’s what we can expect more of with climate change. For every degree of warming, the atmosphere holds 4% more moisture. So if you think of the atmosphere, clouds as like a sponge holding moisture and then wringing it out as rain, as we burn more fossil fuels and the hotter the atmosphere gets, that’s like having an even bigger sponge, holding even more moisture and dumping even heavier rainfall.

John Nielsen-Gammon: When it comes down to a given storm system, it’s not clear that storms will have the same structure in the future as they do at present. There’s some evidence they’ll become more compact and more intense and that means that that would be a second factor favoring more intense rainfall on top of just the warmer temperatures.

Chase Cain: The other problem with the atmosphere soaking up more moisture is that water vapor is also a naturally occurring greenhouse gas. It traps heat. So if humans keep heating the planet, it will drive unnatural amounts of water vapor, a feedback loop creating even more warming.

The solutions we need are both short-term and long-term. We’ll have to invest in expanding and improving our community’s stormwater systems to minimize flooding, but at the same time, we need to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions to stop the warming and limit that feedback loop with more and more water vapor. Basically keeping that sponge from getting any larger. In New York, I’m National Climate Reporter, Chase Cain.

David Dickson: So once again, just a really good overall piece there. Looking at the different pillars, but also bringing a complex theoretical kind of subject about precipitable water, the amount of moisture in our atmosphere, and likening it to sponges that are probably on the side of your sink right there. We’d love that example and there’s many others like that.

I’m glad that we’ve come to the end of our session with just a little bit of time to go through Q&A. I will take a look at that alongside Santiago and Mark. Is there any ones that really jump out? Once again, we encourage you in these last 10 minutes or so to continue to drop your questions in the chat, but we also encourage you to go to our website Covering Climate Now for a lot more resources. Keep up to date in what we’re doing and sign up for our newsletters as well. We’ll drop that link in our chat.

It’s a great way to stay updated but also increase your climate knowledge.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: Thank you so much, David. Yes, let’s go now over some of the questions here. Yes, we will provide the slides. I don’t know if you all can see all the questions, but yes, we will provide the slides. You’ll receive after this session, an email with the slides and also with a survey that we ask you please, please, please, if you can to fill it up, it’s not very long. It’s actually quite short, so it will take you just a couple of minutes of your time and it does help us a lot for future sessions like this. This is the first of a series that is called Covering Climate Now Basics and that you will be able to follow with more sessions that you’ll shape through your answers and they will come quarterly. So in a couple of months, three months, you’ll have more.

Questions from Jim McPhail. Does the greenhouse gas count of the top 15 countries include Scope 3 emissions? Well, in this case, the Scope 3 emissions usually refer more to companies than to countries. I think you probably mean externalized emissions and I don’t think they include that. In that data, however, there’s many, many more countries. So if you go to the link that is in the chat right now and see that report, you’ll see we just took that one because it went over different regions and so on and it was useful for this session, but you can find for many more countries in that session. So I think exploring that, you will find the answer to your question.

Where are some good creative common websites for climate change? Well, depends on what you’re looking for. I love The Conversation, for example, for science related content, Climate Visuals is fantastic for photos and for that kind of stuff. And there’s many, many more. Reach out to us if you are interested. We have also a Slack space that is reserved only for journalists. So we can drop, I think, the link to sign up to that Slack space in the chat and if not, we will send it to you over in that email.

Bruno Miranda Lencastre says, “I work in broadcast television journalism.” Okay, this is for you I think, David. How can I make sure that climate stories I cover don’t sound repetitive or doomsday-y?

David Dickson: Yeah, that’s a thing that we hear a lot. We do want to report on the bad, but we also don’t want it to just sound like doom and gloom. A great way to do that, and again it’s one of those pillars is to highlight the solutions and solutions in and of themselves don’t have to be huge. We understand there are big solutions to the global challenge that is climate change, but especially in broadcast journalism, especially if you’re talking in local TV or anything like that, don’t think small but think for your audience and highlight those solutions.

And there’s so many different solutions depending on the type of story you’re talking about. For example, how climate change is influencing allergy season. Talk to local allergy experts about how changing your medicine or planting trees or for example, as you saw in Chase Cain’s story, the solutions he brought up did include reducing our carbon emissions but also focused more on the smaller side of things in terms of changing infrastructure because we know these types of flood events are going to cause horrible traffic problems, also impact businesses and even tourism in some of these areas.

So once again, there’s a lot of different story angles to cover for climate change, explore and ask your questions of how is this impacting tourism, for example, or infrastructure or economy or anything like that, agriculture, fishing. And that’s a way that it doesn’t become stale but also makes it interesting for your audience. Great question.

Santiago Sáez Moreno: We have time for maybe a couple more questions. This one that I find… I’m sorry, I’m not going to go in order because… I’m going to try to skip the ones that we’ve been over already. There’s one from Jessica Benjamin, I think. I’m sorry if I butchered the pronunciation of your names, but she’s in Ecuador and experienced the recent wildfires and curious about how I can tell the local stories from Ecuador in a way that appeals to audiences in the US and the EU where decision makers and voters can make a bigger impact.

Well, there’s many ways. I would still recommend go through the three pillars. Look for human stories, look at local communities, and find the solutions. Solutions are often rooted in companies and decisions that are not necessarily based in Ecuador. And talking about why those are not being… They can also hit that pillar.

There are many ways of doing it. You can also find out other colleagues in the US and the EU to find, I don’t know, supply chain stories that can be done cross-border and investigations of that time that can help you a lot. I am really sorry that we cannot go through all the questions because they are fantastic, many of them. We have time for one more.

All right, this is this one that is interesting from Ege Özdemir from Turkey. I would like to write all the positive and negative impacts about companies specifically in Turkey. How should I start? When the source is vague, what should I do? Yes, being vague is one of the strategies that many companies do to avoid being scrutinized and it’s basically asking concrete questions When somebody is being vague to you, you can ask a question that is concrete, “Hey, give me the numbers.”

Hey, I’m sustainable, I’m green, I’m net zero. All right, give me the numbers that support that and if not, what I will say is that you don’t have the numbers. That’s reporting it. And many companies and many government and government agencies are doing a great job. I’m not saying that everybody’s bad here. Sometimes they will give you those numbers and you will run them through experts. It’s just normal journalism. It’s just, ‘do journalism as you will do for anything else.’ You take some information, you make sure it’s true, and so on. And we are at the top of the hour, so I’m sorry that we have to stop here.

Thank you so, so much for coming. I am also super proud that we started with… We haven’t lost people through the session. Usually these webinars, these training sessions, lots of people start and they leave at the middle of it. So that means a lot to us. Thank you so much. Keep an eye on your inbox because you will receive, yes, all the materials and a survey that we please ask you. This is for free, it’s for you. The survey is anonymous and confidential and, yes, it helps a lot and that way you will be shaping future training sessions that you can also attend. Thank you so much. Stay safe, good luck, and good morning, good afternoon and good night because this is people from all world in the world here. Bye-Bye.