Press Briefing: Santa Marta & the Future of Climate Journalism

Transcript

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Kyle, hello, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m Kyle Pope. I’m a co-founder of Covering Climate Now, and we are super happy to have you here. For those of you who may not know us, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of newsrooms with thousands of journalists and newsrooms across 60 countries. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help us all do a better job of covering climate change and its impacts. Head to our website, coveringclimatenow.org to learn more and sign up for our newsletters and our trainings, all of which are free. Also, keep an eye on our 89 Percent Project, which is a years-long effort to focus attention on the fact that a large majority of people in the world between 80 and 89% not only care about climate change but they want their governments to do more to solve it. We’re cooking up some cool plans for the summer and the fall for the next iteration of the 89 Percent Project, so please keep an eye out on that. We are super excited to be co-hosting this webinar with our colleagues at UNESCO, and this is on the occasion of the release of their new handbook, which is called “Reporting the Environment: A Practical Manual for Journalists.” I highly recommend it. It’s a comprehensive sort of years in the making project on how to report on climate and the environment in 2026, covering everything from the basics of climate science to disinformation to great solutions reporting and the need to focus on climate justice. We’ll talk in a bit about how the report came to be, and we’re going to highlight some of the main takeaways.

As with all of our webinars at Covering Climate Now, we’ll take questions from working journalists, please. What you can do, if you don’t mind, submit your questions via the Q and A button, which you’ll see at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Include your name and the name of the news outlet you most often report for. Also, keep an eye on the chat function, where you’ll see links from links indicating the stuff that, that you, the people who are on the panel, their work, so the handbook was just put on there, resources will be put on there, so there’ll be stuff for you to pay attention to.  One last housekeeping note, we are recording this session, and we’ll have the video available on our YouTube channel at Covering Climate Now after the webinar.

So let me introduce our panelists again. Very, very happy that they’re here and really appreciative of their time.  Christina Chan-Metoo is a senior lecturer in media and communication at the University of Mauritius, which is helping to train journalists on environment reporting in Indian Ocean countries. Christina, thank you for being here. Keisuke Katori is a senior staff writer covering climate change for the Asahi Shimbun, in Japan. Saorla McCabe is an advisor on communication and information strategy and policy at UNESCO. She also serves as Deputy Secretary of UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication, which supports media development projects in developing countries and countries in transition through targeted grant funding. Phil Newell is the Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition’s Communications Co-Chair and has been monitoring, debunking, and dismantling climate disinformation networks for a long time, and is a valued resource to us at Covering Climate Now. Phil, thank you for being here. Elena González is a journalist and a colleague at Covering Climate Now, where she is our engagement manager. She was in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April for the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, which we’ll talk about in a second. Please join me in giving all of our colleagues a warm virtual welcome. Thank you so much.

So, just to give you a sense of what’s going to happen here, we’re going to start by talking about the state of climate journalism in general, coming out of this Santa Marta conference, which I think raised some interesting lessons for us. Then we’ll talk about this UNESCO handbook, which I think was going to, could, which is going to emerge as an important resource for climate journalists everywhere. At each point in this conversation, we’re going to pause to hear from you. So, again, put your questions in the Q and A. Tell us who you are, who you work for. We may read them and respond to them, and we may even ask you to ask the questions live, and we’ll unmute you. So, again, thank you.

Let’s get started. I’m going to begin today by grounding us in the state of climate policy and the state of climate journalism, and I want to do that by talking about Santa Marta. In many, in many ways. What emerged there, I think, could be important in terms of where the climate conversation goes next, and I think it tells us something also about media attitudes towards the climate story. Again, I’m thrilled to be joined by Elena González, my colleague at Covering Climate  Now, who attended the conference and talked to a lot of the journalists who were there. Elena, thank you for joining us. 

Elena González, CCNow: Thank you, Kyle.

Kyle Pope, CCNow: So set the stage for us here. For those of you, for people on the call who weren’t following us, how did this conference get off the ground, and how was it different from the COP, which was held in Belém, Brazil, a few months earlier.

Elena González, CCNow: Actually, it was quite different, the sense among the participants and the journalists. Santa Marta was born out of the frustration of a group of countries following the COP in Belém in Brazil, and in that summit, any direct mention of phasing out fossil fuels was avoided, so the frustration grew up. You all know that COP decisions are made by consensus, so this means that all countries, all participants should approve every decision that is, that they are making there. And this is at the end of the day a dynamic that ends up very frequently diluting climate agreements and, ultimately, climate climate action. So the Santa Marta conference is not intended to replace the United Nations climate negotiations. Instead, it’s aiming to move beyond negotiations and focus on implementing practical solutions proposed by countries and other actors — and this is important: other actors as well — that believe that the transition is necessary, and that we need to start working now, given the fact that fossil fuel fuels account for about 70, 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions So the idea with Santa Marta was to bring together government, regional authorities, NGOs, scientists, private sector representatives, all together — labor unions, lawmakers, indigenous peoples who played an important role there. And bring them all together to have a meaningful discussions. And also to kind of pressure the COP, the COPs, those United Nations summit, by developing these parallel process.

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Let me just stop you, just for a second, because I want to get to the media coverage of this. I mean, we Covering Climate Now tracked this closely, and from our perspective, it seemed like it was sort of slow, and it was initially difficult to get people in the press to focus on this, although that later changed, and there ended up being a decent amount of coverage. I don’t think. Correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t think. I think there were.. there was very few representation of major American media there, for instance. Right? 

Elena González, CCNow: Yes, we… we have major outlets like press agencies. We didn’t see any national TV network, for example. But we did have representations from journalists from 28 countries and 61 news outlets in total. There were like about 150 journalists covering the summit in presence,

Kyle Pope, CCNow: I could just say, by the way, that Keisuke Katori from Asahi was there, so Asahi was one of the outlets who were there. But, but I mean, tell us why you, I mean, let’s not focus on the American media explicitly, but where, where did this, because I think it’s important for us as we continue this conversation, where— what is that sort of initial reluctance, or what does that slowness tell us about, like, where climate journalism sits right now?

Elena González, CCNow: Are you asking me? 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Yeah, I’m asking you. 

Elena González, CCNow: Yes. At the beginning, Kyle, there was this, and we can discuss here format and content. At the beginning, there was this established accreditation system by the two organizers, the co-host with a cap for assistants and journalists. So, there was this confusion at the beginning. Also because this was the first kind of this summit that was taking place. This has never been like this before. This is the first time that they try a kind of summit like this, and I guess that colleagues were at the beginning, some media outlets were unsure whether to attend. As I said, that this was the first time summit of this format was being held, and its potential relevance was still unclear, especially considering that countries like the United States or China or Saudi Arabia would not be sending representatives there.  But by the end of April, Kyle, as we all know, with the war in Iran was already taking up a very heavy toll in many parts of the world, so this was something that shifted the narrative, and we saw that live at the conference around why, why the world needs to move away from fossil fuels.

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Right, finally. What… what do you… what did you see as like storylines, and I mean, again, if we’re thinking about journalists on this call who are thinking like, okay, this happened, and now sort of.. how does this… how does this shape my coverage going forward, or like, what were the just themes of, storylines, areas of focus, or whatever you left there thinking, what, like journalists who cover climate need to increase their focus of what, for instance?

Elena González, CCNow: One would be, for example, is to monitor if leaders are going to stop leaders, and the media, as well, are going to stop treating Indigenous people and communities just as merely protest-driving figures or pictures, as one member of the community put it, and start covering their stories as policy makers, as active subjects involved in decision making process. And actually they took part, and there was this people’s declaration from from the summit, so we could monitor as journalists if governments are going to really integrate these safe words for fossil fuels, and the other subject, of course, it will be if, if, if the viability of the coalition of the willing, these 57 countries that have established this first step, we will see a second chance to prove it in next year with Tuvalu and Ireland taking taking the next step forward and hosting the second second summit.  So this would be a test to see if these countries are able to move forward without that global unanimity, and they are able to establish roadmaps that it’s something that it’s not required, but they are demanding— the co-host of the of the summit in Santa Marta demanded all countries to establish. So these are two of the points that worth monitor from the journalism media outlets. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you so much. We’ll come back to you later. By the way, if you’re a climate journalist who works primarily in Spanish, you should read Radar Climate, which is for journalists working in Spanish, produced weekly from Elena and her colleagues from Covering Climate Now, and you can find it on our website, coveringclimatenow.org/newsletters, and again, it’s free for everybody So I thought this, you know, this note on coverage of Indigenous people, and this note about how to look forward is a good transition to get to the handbook because some of these issues are talked about there. So really happy to be joined by Saorla McCabe. The handbook was developed with the OSCE representative of the media, and is a practical guide to covering the beat. I think one of the reasons it’s so effective is because it aggregates information from organizations and journalists around the world.  I’m happy to say that Covering Climate Now was able to contribute, highlighting best practices and some very practical tips.

Saorla, welcome. Tell us why UNESCO thought a project like this was needed, and sort of how it came to be. 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: Thanks very much, Kyle. And hello to everyone. It’s really great to be on this webinar with you all. So, maybe I should start with explaining why UNESCO was involved in this issue in the first place, because not everybody knows that UNESCO is the UN agency with the mandate to support freedom of expression, media development. And the safety of journalists, and this means also supporting the conditions that allow for accurate, independent, and reliable information to reach to the public. So the handbook grew out of that work, and within this mandate, UNESCO works on environmental issues at several levels, with member states on information integrity, with journalists and media organizations to strengthen reporting capacity — and this is very much linked to the initiative we’re speaking of — and also with citizens through media and information literacy work. So the handbook builds on a series that UNESCO has developed on journalism education, which includes more than 20 handbooks and model curriculum on topics that range from migration to AI and disinformation, but here we felt that it was particularly important to focus on environmental reporting, both because of the accelerating environmental change that we’re all witnessing, but also due to the profound shifts in the information ecosystem that journalists are facing, including the rise of artificial intelligence, the proliferation of disinformation, and new digital media practices. 

We also feel at UNESCO that questions related to climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution are increasingly intertwined with questions related to information integrity and public trust. This is reflected in UNESCO’s global roadmap for information as a public good in the face of the environmental crisis, which was developed in 2024 and also more recently at COP30, where information integrity featured for the first time in the climate agenda and in the political outcome. So, in many ways this handbook emerged at the intersection of these two developments. On the one hand, a growing demand from journalists for practical support, and then, on the other hand, a growing recognition that high-quality environmental reporting is essential to how societies understand and respond to environmental challenges. Maybe, if I could add that one of the important aspects of this handbook is that it’s— it focuses on the fact that environmental journalism is no longer a niche or special specialist beat, that it now cuts across over, across, sorry, every area of public life. So, for example, a story about extreme heat is not only an environmental story, it’s also a health story. When hospitals face increased emissions, it’s an economic story. With productivity declines, a labor story. When outdoor workers face dangerous conditions, and so on. So this is very much something that is reflected in the handbook. 

So, in short, what we wanted to produce is a practical resource that journalists can use in their day-to-day work, whether it’s verifying a claim or assessing a source, investigating greenwashing, planning a story, or thinking through safety risks before going to the field. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you. This notion of climate on every beat, or climate in every story, is kind of central to the work that we do at Covering Climate Now, and making, trying to get newsrooms to think about integrating climate coverage into all beats, and I think that sort of like the more natural way to go about this, as opposed to like trying to encourage newsrooms to hire a bunch of new climate reporters, which is just unrealistic in the economic climate that we’re in now. 

So, let’s talk about some of the themes that emerge, or anything, or what surprised you about what you found, like what issues, as you guys were putting this together, stood out as particularly important or surprising to you, or changed the way you thought, I mean, you just mentioned part of it, but what else changed the way you might have thought about the media landscape when it comes to climate reporting? 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: I mean, there are a number of things that came out when we were developing this handbook, but personally, I would say that one of the key issues is how important it is to make environmental stories relevant to the audiences that are reading them. So linking global environmental challenges to local realities and to issues that directly affect people’s everyday lives is something that I feel is very important, and an important aspect for environmental journalists to take into account, also in order to then trigger environmental action. In an environment where there are so many constant crisis narratives, and there may be climate fatigue, it’s important to produce reporting that’s accurate, that’s contextualized, that’s engaging, and the handbook really provides some very concrete tips to journalists on how to do that. 

A second aspect, which is perhaps not surprising, because we know so we hear so much about misinformation and disinformation, in particular when it comes to environmental issues, but I think a core message of this handbook is that as climate change and environmental policies become more politically and economically contested, journalists need to be equipped with the tools to address the countless misleading claims and greenwashing false balance and coordinated attempts to shape public understanding in a way that is often misleading. So the manual really provides very concrete practical guidance on encouraging journalists to address questions such as who is making this claim, what evidence supports it, who benefits from it, and what information might be missing. 

And then, maybe a third aspect is the safety of environmental journalists. Again, it’s not a surprise, because UNESCO had actually carried out research on specifically on attacks carried out against environmental journalists, but clearly they’re facing a very high level of physical, digital, legal, and psychological risks, and therefore the manual also provides very concrete guidance on aspects such as risk assessment, secure communications, source protection, safety planning, and so on, to ensure that journalists protect both themselves and also their sources, and of course the integrity of their reporting. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Yeah, thank you for that. It reminds me, we, we did a sort of a white paper a couple of months ago on sort of the state of climate journalism, and frankly, what we saw is some retreat within newsrooms to focus on the climate story, and some of this had to do with political pressure, some of it had to do with fears of online and other attack, and some of it had to do, frankly, with just a deluge of news that had people distracted. And I think that I’m wondering if you, if you saw hints of that retreat as you all were putting this together, or is this part of this general context that you’re talking about? 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: I think we haven’t, we didn’t directly experience any concrete evidence of, of that retreat, but it is an issue that affects journalists covering a range of sensitive issues more, more broadly. I mean, for example, UNESCO has carried out also extensive research on online violence against women journalists, specifically, and we do have concrete evidence of women journalists self-censoring or avoiding covering certain beats, including environmental beats and other sensitive beats, for those reasons, in order to avoid being exposed to such levels of of harassment and violence. But concretely on this I wouldn’t have any evidence to provide at this stage, but as we now move to the implementation phase of the handbook, and we’ll be working with a wide range of newsrooms to encourage the uptake of the guidance that is provided in this handbook, I’m sure that we’ll unfortunately hear such stories. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, this is to me, this is this, this sort of work, and looking at these issues, acknowledging this problem is so important in this particular community, because sometimes being a climate journalist can feel kind of lonely, and or you feel sort of isolated, and so it’s you’re looking at these resources and looking at data, just to sort of, even if it’s to confirm what you are seeing, I think, is super helpful. Also, speaking of community, we want to hear from you, so please put questions in the Q&A. We’ll get to them as they come in, but I think this is a good time to switch to disinformation, which is in the UNESCO report, and we’ve talked a lot about, and it’s something that we see a lot of, and it’s frankly quite effective at skewing what people think they know about climate and how they should act on. 

I mentioned this 89 Percent Project that Covering Climate Now launched, which looks at research, peer-reviewed polling that shows that between 80 and 89% of people in the world care about this, but one of the stark, stark findings was that people didn’t know that they were part of this majority, they didn’t feel like they were part of this majority, and some of that comes from disinformation, so I’m really happy to be joined by Phil Newell, who is among our most experienced chroniclers and debunkers of climate disinformation, and if you have specific questions about disinformation, even if it’s in your market, run it by us, and we’ll see what we can do to help. 

So, Phil, to you lay the groundwork for us here. Is it your sense that climate disinformation is growing, or or not? And if it is, what’s driving these shifts? 

Phil Newell, CAAD: Hi, thanks. Yep, thanks for inviting me today, and for everyone’s attention. Is it growing? Is it getting better or worse? The answer is yes, because yes, the problem is growing, and it’s been great, it’s greater than ever, thanks to social media. The stakes have never been more clear, thanks to this political climate. But fortunately, on the good side, the global commitment to cleaning up our information environment has also never been more encouraging, and so, like you said, I’ve been doing this for a little while now, about a decade, and when I started, it was pretty, it was pretty lonely. Now, the Climate Action Against Disinfo Coalition, it started with about 20 members, about five years ago. We now have over 120 groups from from all around the world, so that’s been really great and really promising, and we’re also getting interest from from the highest levels with with UNESCO and other countries like Brazil creating the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change, or GIICC, or as I call it, that they perhaps don’t like it, the geek, because it is, it is about the truth and getting there, and so this works a lot less lonely than it, than it was, and that’s, that’s been really, really good, really encouraging. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: And so, how much of this, where is this, where it is this disinformation coming from? Like, where are, where it bubbles up from somewhere? Where, what is that? 

Phil Newell: I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not a natural phenomenon, right? It doesn’t bubble up, it’s not natural, it’s pushed top down, and it’s pushed from the, from the fossil fuel industry predominantly. So, it’s really more of a who is it coming from, and it is time and again we see people whose financial interests are backed by the industry, either directly through advertisements and sponsored contents, like my client and scholar, Michelle Amazine, has documented in Content Confusion, free book you can read about, like that sort of sponsored content is one way they do it directly. Other ways they’ll, they’ll do sort of a disinformation subsidy of funding think tanks and other front groups to produce reports, and then send those reports out to you as journalists, and say, like, oh, hey, look at this wonderful information we have about, you know, climate change is a hoax, or yada yada, that’s a disinformation subsidy, right? So you’re getting that for free, and they’re hoping that you’re going to sort of do their job for them and carry that disinformation in your coverage, maybe even by sort of fact checking it yourself, because if you’re doing that, then you’re still doing that like back and forth, and you’re working in their frame, and so, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s coming from the industry, by and large, and so you do see it bubble up on social media, but it’s bubbling up because they’ve been fed that sort of industrial propaganda from, from the top down, from every, every possible angle. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Yeah, I mean, we see, because, because we have partners in a lot of different countries, we see the same, even the same language pop up in locations all over the world, which indicates that it’s coming from a central place, or at least an organized place. I’m curious on what, whether there’s… I mean, what we’ve seen increasingly is it’s sometimes hard for fossil fuel, for the fossil fuel industry to advertise directly, that they get called out on it. People say there’s some news outlets that don’t want to take fossil fuel advertising, which is a whole other conversation, but I wonder if this rise in industry-generated disinformation is a sort of attempt to like counter that resistance when they’re more public in their messaging. 

Phil Newell: Absolutely, absolutely, they’ve, they’ve been playing a long game. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have, have documented it in both Merchants of Doubt and The Big Myth — and The Big Myth is the more recent one — and it is about sort of the propaganda and corporate disinformation campaigns stretching back nearly 100 years now of pushing these ideas of a free market and those kind of catch phrases and narratives that we now in some ways take for granted, but that very much began as sort of obvious advertising sort of slogans that you know you wouldn’t necessarily unironically repeat an ad catchphrase now, but like “now we’re cooking with gas” is the sort of thing we say as a saying when no that’s an ad, like that’s that’s just straight up ad copy, and if you’re doing ad copy, at least get paid for it. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: So, talk to me about how equipped journalists are to deal with this. Most people don’t have the time to spend tracking this like you do, but I mean, my anecdotal sense is that there’s not very wide awareness of what was being aimed at journalists covering this beat, but talk about that. 

Phil Newell: Sure, and by and large, the good news is that, like, yeah, between, like, J-school training and things like this guide from UNESCO, CAAD also has a field guide for covering this and disinfo that we are working to update and globalize with Covering Climate Now. So stay tuned there. Between these different resources, there are sort of the tools that know how, and really it is just down to the base instinct of that commitment to the truth, and the journalism is just uncovering what’s real and publishing it, and that’s really what’s at the core of it. I covered climate disinformation, more or less blogging daily, for about 10 years, and I had zero budget for any sort of advanced tooling and technology and monitoring. Like, you don’t really need all of all of the bells and whistles, you need that focus on on what’s true, and you’re training as a journalist to consult a wide variety of sources, and not just like the one person who gets paid to pitch you all the time, right? Or just like going to social media to find convenient quotes to justify, you know, whatever angle somebody’s pushing, but like actually going to the community and talking people, actually doing those investigations to find out who’s paying somebody to put those pitches in your inbox or to post those things online. Those sort of like investigative journalism techniques, I think, are really valuable, and databases like DeSmog and others that track a lot of that are really good starting point for figuring out in your local market who may be paying who to say what, because that’s really what you’re going for, is who’s pulling the strings, what people with power and money are paying someone to tell these lies. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Again, if you have a question about disinformation and when I asked Phil directly, or ask Saorla about how it’s reflected in the guidebook, please put your Q&A in. Phil, let’s talk about AI and how that’s changing the game. I mean, every day it seems to be, in terms of video and photography, seems to be getting better and more widespread. What is this going to do to the disinformation landscape, as especially as it relates to climate coverage? 

Phil Newell: So, it’s not great, short story. CAAD is working with academic researchers like Travis Cohen of Exeter on using large language models to catalog and quantify climate lies, and that’s sort of the more techie, not exactly the public-facing side, because when it comes to the generative AI and other public faces uses, mostly what I’ve seen from monitoring digital environments is just harms, just one kind of harm after another, even just beyond the fundamental plagiarism of the technology. So, like, though we know the AI boosters claim all sorts of things about being great for climates, we looked at it recently. Looked at a lot of those claims, 74% of those industry claims about climate benefits of AI, totally unproven, with a bunch of them just completely unsourced. They’re like they’re just out there saying stuff. The harms, meanwhile, are very real and adding up. There’s the water, electricity consumption on the environmental side, there’s that the AI saving data serving data centers are run on fossil fuels, and then polluting local communities for like a plagiarism chatbot, which, why, so, yeah, I think it’s a bad product, I think it, it creates things that, that aren’t real by definition, and so for liars who are creating imagery for, like, you know, claiming falsely that wind turbines offshore are killing whales, there’s no real pictures of that, so they can use AI to generate pictures of it, right? The same way for the AI texts, climate policy, like you mentioned, super popular, 89% of people want more. So, if you can afford to generate AI text comments, you can submit them to the public comment periods for regulations, and make it seem like the public is against climate action, and that’s what we’ve seen the technology used for already. 

So it is sort of like Superman, of you know, if you can afford the pocket dimensions and monkeys on keyboards to make it look like the public is against something popular like climate action or Superman, if you can afford those disinfluencers and podcasters and bot farms, because we live so online, you can make it seem popular, but it’s not, you still have to pay, and so, as journalists, I think cutting through that noise of the online to say, who’s paying it? Is this, are you popular? Are you just like advertising a lot, and that’s how you’re getting these views. Are you just sort of friends with Facebook’s boss, and that’s how you’re getting the engagement, looking for that actual popularity in your real world, in your real community, versus what’s some studies called the Fun House Mirror Factory of social media, where you sort of think that people who get paid to post are actually representative of the general public, and it’s not. 

So, what I like to say is, is the best thing you can do with generative AI for the climate is just turn it off. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: It’s getting increasingly hard to do that. I mean, there’s a lot of, like, not, not even, you don’t even opt in, it goes automatically into AI answers. We have some interesting questions here, and I wanted to ask, and please, when you, when you put your question in the Q&A, tell us who you are, to tell us who you’re with, and tell us whether you’d be okay going on camera and asking the question. Vanessa Fischer has an interesting question about official sources. Here, Vanessa and I, and I, and I responded that asking her if she would be okay with coming on. She said yes. Vanessa, if you could just raise your virtual hand and we can unmute you, and you can ask this question of Phil directly. Just give us half a second. There she goes. We’re going to unmute you. Welcome. Thank you for being here. 

Vaness Fischer, Deutsche Welle: Hello. Thank you for having me. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Tell us, tell us first who you’re with, and then we can get into what you wanted to know. 

Vaness Fischer, DW: Yeah, so I’m leading the Environment Department at DW, Germany’s international broadcaster, we’re actually also part of Covering Climate Now, and have been working together for a while, and we do produce continuously a lot of content on environmental and climate, we do a lot of climate reporting, and what we are, and we, of course, also address the US audience, but we address also the African audience and the Indian audience, and since a lot of climate data has always been provided by the US, we are at the moment with our fact checking team also questioning ourselves on how reliable this data still is and how do we deal with the fact that yeah so much of the scientific work at NOAA for example and and other official sites has been changed. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Over to you, Phil. 

Phil Newell: Thanks. Yeah, that is, that is a great question, and it is, it is a tough one. I think the answer is, fortunately, science has a lot of replication and duplication, so one of the ways you could maybe check is is to talk to some people at sort of the European monitoring agencies and the EU agencies that are doing maybe not the same work but similar, and then maybe check with, you know, the Japanese Space Agency, also keeps all the sort of some of those temperature records and things like that, and and so you know using different— the same way you would get different sources for a story, treating the science like that, in that, yeah, you can’t necessarily rely on it. That said, I think currently this administration is probably less inclined to be tinkering with the technical details of things, so much as just shutting down the research bodies in general and the research offices writ large. You know, we’ve worried a lot about sort of what sneaky and smart things they might do to tamper with data, when really it’s just sort of the sledgehammer approach of just shutting it down and cutting the funding, and so it is. 

You kind of have to look elsewhere and rely on other sources that can be more reliable, and then potentially triangulate between them and compare and see, because in general with science, the observations, you know, a lot of people can do, and different people are doing different versions of, and so sort of it can take a little time and effort, and often scientists can really help with this, because they’re already sort of doing this naturally, they’re immersed with the literature, they know the different sort of camps of who’s doing exactly what, and how they compare, but it is the kind of thing that, like, you can’t rely on any one source, sort of, no matter who or what it is, and so cultivating that larger bench of that larger rolodex of different official sources, potentially more reliable as political swings go back and forth. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Saorla, if there’s anything that you want to chime in on on this as we move forward, feel free. 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: Thanks very much, Kyle. I was, I was just going to say, actually, something quite similar about triangulating, triangulating your information, and one of the things that this handbook really underlines is the importance of applying the same verification standards to all sources, even though we know that some will be more credible than others, but it’s important to just make sure that no source is treated as being beyond scrutiny, and that it’s really wise, where possible, to try and triangulate information and consult multiple experts, and also review the underlying methodologies and data sets, and be transparent also with your audiences about where, where the information is coming from, and how it’s been verified. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Great, we have another question from Marie Kermer. Marie, if you could raise your hand, and we’ll unmute you. Marie, welcome. 

Marie TK NAME: Hello, can you hear me now? 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Yeah, we can hear you. Thanks for thanks for coming on. Tell us who you’re with, and then you can ask your question. 

Marie TK NAME: Yes, so I’m a freelance journalist in Germany, and I work for different media outlets, but more recently for the effort set, and my question is, how disinformation changed in recent decades, and what, according to your opinion, are the most concerning narratives in 26 Yes. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you. Go ahead, Phil. 

Phil Newell: Thanks. Yeah, it’s interesting watching the narratives over a long period of time, because there is sort of a natural ebb and flow as, as people who are looking to make climate policy real are in power. The opposition narratives will be much more greenwashing, much more like, “oh, we can be part of the solution, you can trust us.” Much more about how the climate policies themselves are, maybe, are not going to work about renewables, are too expensive, and things like that. Whereas, when the flip happens, and they sort of have one of their own in charge, the climate disinformation is much more sort of bald-faced lies of denial and hoax, and just that sort of straight up and obvious denial. 

But what really concerns me is that they’ve gotten a lot more creative in recent years, and so, for example, a couple of years ago we looked at 45 of the major anti-trans organizations in the US who are spreading trans hate and disinformation, and like 80% of them were getting fossil fuel funding one way or another, so like I think it was about 40 of the 45 organizations, yeah, we’re getting in one way or another, either from a fossil fuel billionaire who is then donating, or from one source or another. A lot of these groups spreading what we consider culture wars hate as unrelated are actually backed by, if not Big Oil, big carbon in one way or another, or the billionaires whose fortune come from them. So, like, they know climate disinfo is unpopular, they know 89% of the public wants more climate action, and so to build that sort of polarized power there they’re using hate, and so that’s really what what concerns me. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Wait, I have to stop you on that. So that’s astonishing. So you’re saying that they, the, and— you said that they were funding anti-trans messaging, and the idea is just to create a general zone of distrust and hate, and what do you think was the motivation? 

Phil Newell: Well, the fossil fuel industry knows that all over the world white boys are kind of politically overprivileged, and that’s the audience that they needed is is white men and or traditionally and often colonized institutions of power and so a way to do that is instead of the science through that culture frame and through that polarized right wing frame and so they’re not necessarily funding the podcasters to do climate disinformation specifically or to do anti-trans work specifically, but they’re funding them to build that audience for their fundamentally disinformation-based and pro-pollution, anti-human sort of agenda, and so the entry point online, they, what they found was, you know, they would give $5–10 million to some group of podcasters and really kind of let them go, and part of that was taking the pitches from their other climate think tanks and incorporating the sort of fake experts who spread climate disinformation onto the podcasts, but then also they found that what was popular and what the platforms, what some of the platforms really incentivized and spread around more with the algorithms we’re tuned for, was that anti-trans hate, and so that’s been sort of the bait that they’ve used, that’s the top of the funnel to drag people into that conspiracy theory rabbit hole. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you. We’re going to take one more question related to disinformation and keep moving here. Jay Shah, you want to raise your hand? Jay is from Delaware Public Media in the US. Jay, welcome. 

Jay Shah, Delaware Public Media: Hi. Thank you for having me. So, here, Delaware Public Media, we’re a very small station. Every person does the job of five people, and we cover the entire state. We’re the only NPR outlet here, and so we do rely a lot on the national coverage that NPR HQ provides to get global issues like this to our listeners, but we also do try to incorporate local angles when possible, especially if there is a local tie through a source or an organization that’s directly involved in the issue, whatever, but for this type of topic I would like to find a way to get this to our audience from a local perspective, but also helping them understand why an international issue, like an international conference, or a globally occurring issue like AI and disinformation fueled by the fossil fuel industry and greenwashing and all that stuff, how that affects everyday Delawareans, whether they care about climate change, believe in it or not. So, what is the best way for me to, for my newsroom to cover something like this, while keeping it Delaware specific? 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Phil, before you go in, let me ask Elena, who works with a lot of local newsrooms, and then we’ll come back to you, and Sarah, if you have anything else. Elena. 

Elena González, CCNow: Yeah, thank you, Kyle. And yes, this is something that we discuss in the training sessions that we have, trying to localize the story for our audience, and I think that it’s always important to know your audience, and in the example that Jay gave in Delaware, maybe find out what sector is big in Delaware, what industry is big in Delaware, and how you can connect this to a global agreement or a global conference, and make it relevant to your specific audience, and choose an angle that your audience care about. But we need to find out first what our audience interests are, and try to put it also important that some sometimes we forget in the headlines, and that we need to relate with our audience in the headlines, not only in the body of the of the information that. Regarding with conferences about this information, I will let Phil answer that part. 

Phil Newell: Yeah, I think ultimately we’re going to need renewables everywhere, right? Like, we need wind and solar farms in every community to get off of fossil fuels, and so that’s in part where that local happens, is what’s what’s happening at that town council meeting? Are there six wackos radicalized by disinformation showing up and ranting about, you know, wind turbines killing whales, or whatever, as Delaware might be trying to do offshore wind projects, and are they representative of the community, or are there, you know, are they the 11% and 89% of the others are staying home because they haven’t been sort of force fed this radicalizing propaganda, and are instead just normal people going about their lives, and so how do you speak to them, how do you talk to them? 

Well, what we’ve seen is that solar is socially contagious, and so talking about how your neighbors have solar rooftop, and it’s going great for them, has actually been a really convincing way to get other people to do the same. And so we’re going to need solutions at the local level, and that’s a place to look. And how are maybe their state-based groups in Delaware fighting that on the disinformation angle? Because they’re, I know there are, I don’t know the names offhand, but then it’s sort of a matter of going and seeing, look at who’s lobbying at the state house to maybe prevent or water down regulations? Who’s maybe funding a small state campaign to run against something like offshore wind in the state? You can look for those local political issues, because climate change, it’s big and global, but you know we’re all going to have to deal with it at the local level, and so also at the same time, the damages, the heat waves, the sea-level rise. Delaware is not a huge state, so sea-level rise probably, you know, pretty pretty big. 

So those kind of ways you can, you can go about it, you can look at individuals who may be lying. And then you can also look at, sort of find on on Facebook and other social media sites, some of the local groups of, you know, Delaware’s Against Responsible Solar Power, or something like that, where they’re using those little groups to start organizing either for or against climate action, and look at that as a community that you could talk to, and not necessarily as representative of the general public, because the online is not the real world, but it is a pocket, and so how that influences the real world, where they come up things like that, very easy to do a story about how a group on Facebook has huge numbers and looks like it’s huge, and then they turn out for the actual protest, and it’s, and it’s literally a dozen people, and it’s pretty pitiful. 

Whereas I know a lot of times climate advocates will put together pretty popular public displays, and it’s, it’s real tough to get that media attention. And so recognizing that 89% and reflecting it, I think is the way to go. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Saorla, anything else to add? This question of, like, how do you, because everybody’s in the same situation. I mean, how do you take these big issues and make it relevant to your audience, sometimes your very specific local audience? 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: Well, I think it’s to a great extent selecting those angles that identify some of the global challenges that are most relevant to your local community, so in the case of Delaware, might be looking at whether they’re particularly affected by one type of consequence of climate change. Maybe, for example, given that I think Delaware is the lowest lying state in the US, maybe rising sea levels and flooding. Flooding might be of particular interest to the local community, but also looking at whether some of the local businesses and industries that are implemented in Delaware and around are making environmental claims that might deserve scrutiny, those kinds of things that really just link these global issues that we’re speaking about with very concrete impacts that they have on the local community. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you, that was great. Let’s turn now to a different part of the challenge of telling the climate story, which is more not so much external but internal. How are newsrooms themselves thinking about doing this in ways that better connect with their audiences, because ultimately that’s all of our jobs. I mean, our job is to tell stories that resonate with people. 

So, very happy to have Keisuke Katori with us, who helps guide the climate coverage at Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, which is a proud— we’re proud to have them as a partner at Covering Climate Now, and they’re one of the global leaders in climate coverage in the world. Keisuke, talk us through how you all, again, these disinformation and economic pressures, they’re sort of pressures that are coming in from the outside, but we need to think about what can we do to better connect with our audiences on climate, especially in this context of some retreat in some newsrooms. So, tell us, in your newsroom, what kind of stories connect best with audiences, and what are what are things that you see them responding to sort of like this question that the reporter in Delaware had that makes it feel like this is something that affects their lives? 

Keisuke Katori, Asahi Shimbun: Thank you so much for having me. And so the Asahi Shimbun is a daily newspaper, and we still have 3 million copy of the printing edition every day, so quite huge But subscriptions are declining at about 5% a year, so our readership is also aging. So that means we need to do two things at the same time: one is guide existing readers towards digital platform, and also reach younger audiences. So let me just introduce our newsroom. The Asahi Shimbun, we have a quite small climate beat, and we have three reporters, including myself, and one editor, specific, specifically in charge. We also work closely with reporters in other beats, like business, sports, and politics, and lifestyles, and as well as the local and the overseas bureaus. So many of those reporters have covered environmental issues in the past. So our reporting tend to be very cooperative, and so let me show the example what kind of the coverage is— as Kyle mentioned earlier, the Asahi is also participating in the 89 Percent Project, so there is survey data showing that 89% of people want stronger climate policies in their own countries. 

As part of this, a Japanese university survey found that one in three voters want to vote for candidates whose views on climate policies are close to their own. So building on this, we published articles asking why the climate crisis is not becoming a major political issue in Japan, and how voters can put pressure on politicians. So this article revealed a lot of feedback from the audience, such as this showed that climate change can be a real election issue, and this highlighted important perspectives. At the same time, audience ask the very practical questions: How can they actually choose who to vote for based on climate policies? 

In that article, we suggested talking directly with candidates during the campaign, but many audiences responded that this feels very difficult, and a little bit shy away from that to that, and asks: Why doesn’t the media investigate and provide that information for us? 

So, ahead of the upper house election in July last year, we conducted the political questionnaire on climate change with 10 major political parties. We asked about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emission policies on renewable energy and nuclear power and coal fire power plant. Nine out of 10 parties responded by its deadline. So we also conducted a similar survey during the lower house election in November. By doing this survey, the media can push political parties themselves to think more seriously about climate change. Using leaders’ feedback in this way

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Go ahead, go ahead, no, go ahead. 

Keisuke Katori, Asahi Shimbun: So, using leaders’ feedback in this way not only increased audience satisfaction, but also helps lay the awareness of climate reporting inside the newsroom. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: It’s interesting that you, what you found is that it sounded like your readers — and again, your readership is huge — were they were more put.. it sounds like they’re almost pushing for more aggressive reporting — right? — from the news. Because part of some of what we hear a lot of is that newsrooms need to figure out hopeful ways to talk about climate. They need to figure out, like, very personal ways, very solutions-based, like very much based on your life, which I imagine you find as well. But your readers were also saying, like, we really want, we really want to, like, force elected officials to answer how they feel about climate. Did I have.. did I get that right? 

Keisuke Katori, Asahi Shimbun: Yes. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: So, by the way, before I ask my next question of Keisuke, if you have a question about how to think about coverage in your newsroom, how do you think about the kinds of stories that could resonate, or can resonate? If you have questions about, like, again, we’ve talked a lot about this 89% idea, which is basically another way to say that no matter where you live, a majority of people that you write or report for care a lot about this, which may not be the narrative that you understand or that your audience understands, so how do you reflect that in your coverage? Please put the question in the Q&A. 

So, how do you think about balancing, Keisuke, this this sort of accountability reporting of public officials with sort of like more hopeful solutions-based reporting that gives people some sense of agency with the problem? 

Keisuke Katori, Asahi Shimbun: So, well looking at our digital subscription data, climate change and environment topics, including such as plastic pollution and biodiversity, attract relatively younger audience compared to other articles. So audience segmentation also shows that the story resonates not only with people interested in the cutting edge science and breaking news, but also with those who want to update their own thinking on issues like human rights and gender and diversity. 

On the other hand, at the same time, the gap between the audience who are interested in climate issues and those who are not is widening, and the [inaudible] audience with strong interest, especially long-time print subscribers, often ask for more climate and environmental coverage, like the audience who is [inaudible] on the election issues. So they are also starting to want to know what they can do and how they can get involved. They are looking for concrete solutions. But there is no silver ballot for the climate crisis, and the solution were very hard to find. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Super interested in— and I’ll open it up to other people on this panel, this question of— I mean, Keisuke said what we’ve heard other people say, which is that climate news tends to attract a younger demographic of people, younger readers, viewers. It tends to attract a more engaged news consumer. Just curious, if anybody else either has any insights or data about, like, who, what is what is increasing your climate coverage, what could that do to the sort of profile of your audience? Saorla, Phil, Elena, anybody have any thoughts on that? 

Elena González, CCNow: I’ll start. I think that format is important to attract audiences, and we need to position ourselves in a place where we can find those audiences. So if we are going to get people that get their news on social media, and we are trying to write longform journalism, we’re not to get to going to get there, of course. As we used to say, we need to get your audience. Sometimes we as journalists are afraid to try new formats, new new ways to tell the same story, and I think that we need to embrace this this process of knowing more about how to communicate climate. And if people are on social media, we need to get there to talk the language they are talking and the way they are communicating. Actually one of the programs that we have at Covering Climate Now is aimed at that, at trying to translate a climate journalism into other formats. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Anybody else on audience segmentation? 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: I think just on the just building upon what Elena was saying, trying out different formats and formats that are particularly relevant to younger audiences, which are those who are often most active in environmental action and are most concerned, because they’re the future generations, but they’re also disengaging to some extent from traditional media, so I think the key here is not really to get them interested in environmental issues, because for many that’s already the case, but rather providing narratives in a way that is compelling to them, trying out different formats. 

There’s no specific section in the handbook about how to engage with younger audiences, but there is very much guidance on how to come up with creative formats, and the handbook also underlines the importance of shorter video formats, you know, with a reduced attention span that we know among many younger audiences. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Somebody in the chat asked, what’s a young audience, and I basically said it’s younger than whatever your average audience is, and it’s different for every outlet. Okay. Great, thank you, Keisuke. I’m going to turn now to Christina. Christina focuses on a particular part of the developing world, which also happens to be one of the regions of this planet most affected by climate change. And Christina, I’m sort of curious, we had this, I think, important question from Jay in Delaware, which is like, How do I make this relevant to me? Like, how do I make this relevant to me, and I’m sort of curious what you’ve heard today, especially for this region that you focus on, like what’s particularly relevant, and then what are what are issues that we haven’t even talked about that climate journalists there are really focused on that maybe the rest of us need to sort of turn our attention to. 

Christina Chan-Metoo, University of Mauritius: Thanks, Kyle. Thanks for having me on this panel. So, like you mentioned, I’m actually leading a training for journalists who are from the region, the Indian Ocean region, so that includes countries like Mauritius and Rodrigues, Madagascar, Seychelles, Comoros, and Djibouti, and this is actually a training which is in French, because what we’ve realized is that many of those populations actually are exposed to media in French in those countries. And a lot of resources that we see online tend to be more English, and we feel that we need to reach out to people in the languages that they understand. And that’s obviously what we would ideally want to have, for example, local languages being used in a next step, but that’s not possible for the time being, but this is something we want to contemplate. 

So many of the issues that have been raised by the other panelists are actually very relevant to us in our countries. Maybe even more so, because what we see is that we are living a reality on the ground, because we are seeing extreme weather patterns in our island states, in our vulnerable countries. We’ve had, like, for example, very intense cyclone, we call them cyclones here around this corner of the world, which was called Freddy in 2023, which that went across multiple countries from Malawi, Mozambique, Madagascar, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mauritius over five weeks, so that’s really extreme. And we’ve had a series of chaotic flash floods, and actually this year in Mauritius we’re supposed to be in our tropical winter, but the onset of winter has really been delayed. So we’re really seeing an acceleration in the crisis, and we’re seeing it for real. Like two months ago, we saw— I mean, Mauritius is probably known to some of your attendees today as a tropical luxury beach destination, but one of our key beaches, which is called Tamara, actually got wiped out over a week, all right, because we had an extreme tide and and we hear that the effect of that tide were aggravated by actions that were taken. 

Now the thing is, the way this is reported on the ground is in our island states we tend to see journalists who are not trained to go deep into the science, not trained or exposed as well, because we lack that kind of exposure to understand what are the real causes, and very often what we see is that they do like he says, she says reporting, and they just go on the ground, and then just to just open the mic to people who are there, and so-called experts, not to say that I’m trying to say that they are not good experts, but it’s just that the narratives tend to be sometimes politically oriented, depending on what side of the fence you’re on, and after two months, right now, we still do not understand what has happened? Some people say that the ministry didn’t do anything to, because they knew this was happening. They didn’t do anything to mitigate. They say that some people who are connected to the political, to the minister, did some actions that aggravated the whole thing. And then there’s an activist on the ground who’s been very, very visible in the media as well, who has been showing what he’s doing, and he’s trying to bring in excavators, and the ministry people are saying this is actually worse, he’s worsening things. 

So nobody understands what’s happening really. The fact is when you have a whole beach that is erased like almost overnight, it’s not just a beach for tourists, it’s also fishermen that are affected. It’s people who live on those coasts, and it’s not only about the the the effect of climate change that’s there, but it’s also that the fact that people are squashed between this coastal erosion coming in, then, but also the pressure from real estate developments, because we are, we keep approving big time projects for luxury resorts and high-end villas, so what’s happening is that we wanted to, through this program, to help our journalists pivot to a new kind of reporting that is less from the passive translation kind of reporter to more of an interactive investigator reporter, but also not localized in a single country or a single island, but try to make to identify regional patterns, because, for example, like Mauritius, we are one of the countries, is which tiny island, but which we’re one of the countries in the world that has the biggest area in terms of ocean in the world, and it’s connected to the Seychelles, so much so that we have some agreements in on how to manage those areas, but the reporting isn’t translated, and it’s very, very opaque to the populations on the ground. 

So, there are so many issues that we could touch on, and what we want is to give the opportunity to journalists to remove them, not remove, but at least take some time from their day to day pressure of reporting on a day to day basis, and to really think about the complexity of the situation, and also try to find at least reports on sustainable solutions that will stay with us and that will have long-term impact, long-term positive impact, at least for our populations.

Kyle Pope, CCNow: I’m super interested in your training program, and just tell us where you are. Like one, can we get a link so people can learn about it? Where are you in the sort of cohort process, or in the timeline? Is it, is it still possible for people to take part? 

Christina Chan-Metoo, University of Mauritius: We’re already in the third month of the program, so, and it’s French-speaking, so it’s was quite targeted, because actually we had a first workshop last year, which was a short one, and we did this one as a follow-up. We designed this with the local Media Trust in Mauritius, and with the UNESCO and the university, and we have 26 people already on board, so and we’ve already covered half of the program. The first half, how we design it is, we brought in technical and scientific experts, so we have a climate and environmental specialist, we have a climate finance specialist, we have a conservationist as well, for a very good NGO that did conservation on a small island and really saved endangered species in Mauritius. And now we actually going into the practical aspect of it, we’re going to split into groups and do mentoring. We’re going to ask our participants to propose topics based on what they’ve been exposed to with the scientific knowledge and technical knowledge that they’ve acquired, and we’re asking them to go on the ground and propose topics. And then we’ll do a mentorship with them. 

So, I will be doing part of the mentoring, and I have a seasoned journalist who works with Franz Van Gard, and I’m also hoping to bring in someone who is, I’ve heard you talk about audience segmentation, someone who is a specialist in audience engagement and data analysis to help us adapt to help the participants adapt their content to the audiences, to the platforms, to the also in terms of the distribution patterns. So we’re trying to ensure that real stories, concrete stories come out of this training, and it’s just not just a training where we give them content and then they go away. We want them to collaborate as well. I mean, we’re hoping that that is going to happen. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you. And thank you for that work. It sounds amazing. I mean, I’m curious, whether.. I mean, you mentioned.. I mean, I’m always very.. my ears always perk up when I hear from or about climate journalists who are both reporting about and living through these dramatic changes from where they live, and that’s increasingly people in large portions of the world now. But in just, just— 

Christina Chan-Metoo, University of Mauritius: If you allow me, is that many journalists who are in those countries, they actually are not specialized in climate coverage, and most of the time they are attached to newsrooms that are really, they do everything right. Specializations are a bit difficult in small, small countries like ours, because the newsrooms want to maximize output by the journalists, so it’s an opportunity for them to get out of that, actually. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Well, and that sort of leads to the question I was going to ask, which is, I mean, you, you know, even in places where the climate impact is direct and personal and real, it’s still hard to get some newsrooms to focus on this topic. I mean, we’ve seen— is it your sense that there’s that you’re seeing progress?

Christina Chan-Metoo, University of Mauritius: I think it’s early days, but I have seen at least one journalist who has already launched a small newsletter on his own. It’s still very brittle, but actually he is trying to experiment as well with distributing through WhatsApp. A newsletter that is focused on specific issues, and one of the the last issue that he sent out was about ecological issues, so at least there is the desire to do things. It’s just that they need the space and the time and the mentoring to bring their stories to fruition, and to feel that they are also, because this is also, you know, I have to mention that this is funded by UNESCO, and the fact that this happens under the ages of UNESCO Media Trust and the university, this gives them more, let’s say, more weight in the newsrooms to say, okay, you need to publish my stories, you need to give me space for that kind of stories, because it’s something which is not just a whim and fancy as a young reporter, you know, because sometimes the young reporters — some of you have mentioned this — young, [climate] is perceived as being something which is more interesting to young people, young audiences, and young reporters as well, so that that gives them more weight. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: I see this is so interesting. If you, anybody, we have, we’re approaching near the end of our time, but we can get in a couple of questions. If you have questions for Christina, I wonder if anybody else on the panel has thoughts or questions about the kind of training that they’re doing or the kind of outreach that they’re doing, which again I’m super interested in hearing more about. 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: Sarah, just to touch upon one of the points that Christina was making regarding the importance of having resources available in local languages. I think it’s a critical aspect. I actually find all, found all of your intervention extremely insightful, Christina. But on that specific point, just for you to know that the handbook, the UNESCO handbook, or UNESCO-OSC handbook, will be published in French, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese for now, but we’re very much open also to partnerships with any organizations that might be able to ensure translations into other languages, including local languages, and maybe also I’ll use this opportunity to say that should any of the journalists or media room, sorry, media outlet representatives in this call be interested in making use of the handbook and collaborating with Sundar, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Christina Chan-Metoo, University of Mauritius: Thank you so much. I can actually already give you names, I mean, maybe later on I’ll send you mail names, for example, for Creole language, for Seychelles and Mauritius. We do have the capacity to do that. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: So, before we wrap up, I just want to go quickly around the room and just try to get from everybody a very quick sense of given the themes that we’ve talked about, and given the general political and economic and disinformation climate facing climate journalists, especially, what is what is one thing that sort of newsroom leaders can, what can sort of turn their attention to and focus on right now? I know it’s a big question, but to boil it down into what can they do to like engage audiences on climate in ways that they haven’t been, and also make sure that they’re insulating themselves from some of these pressures that we’ve been talking about, Phil, we’ll start with you quickly, please. 

Phil Newell, CAAD: I will just say, don’t worry too much about audiences and attention spans, like short clips, but also we watch full seasons on Netflix, right? We watch four-hour podcasts, so make a good content, and then just keep in mind, Scooby Doo, like climate disinformation, seems like a big scary monster, but werewolves and vampires aren’t real. You don’t need the silver bullets and the holy water, you just need to channel your inner meddling kid and rip off those masks to reveal that disinfo is just some guy getting paid to trick you. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you, by the way. Interesting point that Kathleen O’Hara put in the Q&A about the use of the term climate change. A lot of newsrooms, including The Guardian, and frankly, Covering Climate Now, and other people are using climate crisis to describe what’s really happening. So it’s a good, it’s a good point to make. Elena, to you. 

Elena González, CCNow: I would say know your audience, and there are different ways to get to know your audience, like ask them directly. There is a segment in the French TV in France Télévisions using a scientist to answer live questions from the audience. It’s a great way to get story ideas. And also get to know what your audience interests are. And as we always say in the training sessions, localize, humanize, offer solution stories, they always get very high — and there’s data from the Reuters and Oxford Institute about that, solution stories do better, that doesn’t mean sugarcoating, it means offering an alternative and exploring solutions. So that would be my take. 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: Saorla, well, I think my previous co-panelists just covered some of the points I would have made, but I would say also encouraging your journalists to integrate the environmental angle in the different beats that they’re covering, working across disciplines, envisaging — where possible, of course; it might not be possible for smaller local organizations, but envisaging — transnational collaborations where possible, on bigger investigative stories, and then just to flag that we are also going to produce a companion document to this handbook, which is targeting journalism educators, so for teaching reporting on environmental issues at university level, so equipping also the next generation of journalists with the tools needed to report on these issues. 

Keisuke Katori, Asahi Shimbun: Thank you, Keisuke. Well, so sometimes climate news is overwhelming all the audience, but by finding and reporting on the seas of climate action already deployed throughout the society, so we can help them take roots and clues, so we also need to connect groups and individuals who are currently acting separately and make them visible as a larger collective. As the 89 Percent Project shows, this can encourage audience who thought they are isolated or in the minority. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: Thank you, Christina. 

Christina Chan-Metoo, University of Mauritius: Thanks, guy. I think the pain points that have been put forward, I really totally agree with him, with them, localize, humanize, collaborate. Keep the complexity, don’t dumb down, even if you make it more accessible. And also think about the more vulnerable countries like ours, which are more exposed, and it’s much more visible in the daily lives of people. 

Kyle Pope, CCNow: That’s a great way to end. Thank you all so much for being here. It’s been terrific. We’ve given all the links to the UNESCO handbook, which you should spend some time with. Keep following us at Covering Climate Now, where we’ll have additional resources and webinars and events that you can tune into. But thank you again for coming. It’s been a great morning, afternoon, evening, depending on where you are, and we hope to see you again soon. Take care. 

Christina Chan-Metoo, University of Mauritius: Thank you so much. Bye, everyone. 

Saorla McCabe, UNESCO: Many thanks. Bye, bye, bye.