Covering Climate Now announces that the Guardian newspaper and the Agence France-Presse global news agency are the lead partners in a Who’s Who of news organizations collaborating on The 89 Percent Project, a year-long exploration of the pivotal but overlooked fact that an overwhelming majority of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger climate action.
Joining the Guardian and AFP in The 89 Percent Project are these core partners: The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, and TIME magazines based in the US; the National Observer newspaper in Canada; the Deutsche Welle global broadcaster in Germany; the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy; the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Japan; and the multinational collaborative Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism based in Jordan.
All journalists — staff or freelance, with big or small outlets, CCNow partners or not — are welcome to participate in The 89 Percent Project. There is no entry fee or minimum number of stories to produce; all news outlets will decide for themselves what stories they run.
The 89 Percent Project launches on April 21 with a joint coverage week focused on the people who comprise the 89%: Who are they? How do their numbers vary across countries, genders, and ages? What kinds of climate action do they want governments to take, and what are the main obstacles to such action?
The idea for The 89 Percent Project arose from a growing number of scientific studies finding that the vast majority of the human population — 80 to 89% — want governments to do more about climate change. That mass sentiment has not been reflected in most news coverage, however. Instead, the prevailing narrative is one of denial, retreat and despair. This in turn might explain a second scientific finding: The global climate majority does not realize it is the majority; most of its members think their fellow citizens don’t agree.
These little-known facts seem especially newsworthy at a time when some governments and corporations are backtracking on climate action even as ferocious heat waves, fires, and floods are harming more and more people and economies around the world. CCNow believes that reporting on what the silent climate majority thinks is not only good journalism, it’s also smart business. It makes people feel seen, and as such is likely to attract more of them to read, watch, or listen to our coverage going forward.
The 89 Percent Project is organized around two tent pole events: the CCNow Joint Coverage Week starting April 21, and a second week of coverage in November in the lead-up to the COP30 UN climate summit in Brazil. CCNow invites all journalists and news organizations to join in running stories, collaborating with colleagues, joining and organizing public events, amplifying the project’s journalism on social media, and more.
The 89 Percent Project recalls CCNow’s first Joint Coverage Week, in September of 2019, when our then–300-plus partner news outlets ran thousands of news items that helped break the “climate silence” that had long prevailed in the media. Now, we’re trying to break a different kind of climate silence: an unwitting silence around the fact that almost 9 out of 10 people on earth want their governments to get serious about climate change. Journalism covers governments all the time. The 89 Percent Project flips the script by focusing on people, and what those people want from their governments.
For more information on the project — including logos, story ideas, information about story sharing, links to the scientific research — email us at editors@coveringclimatenow.org. We can’t wait to see the coverage you produce.
From Us
The 89 Percent Project. CCNow is launching a year-long initiative to shine light on the fact that a huge majority of the global population want governments to “do more” to fix climate change, which all too often is missing from the public climate discourse. We’ll kick off with a CCNow Joint Coverage Week this April; we invite newsrooms and journalists everywhere to join us. Learn more.
TIME’S RUNNING OUT: Enter your work now for consideration in the 2025 CCNow Journalism Awards. The submission deadline is Monday, March 31, at 11:59pm US Eastern Time. Enter here.
Locally Sourced newsletter. The latest edition of our biweekly newsletter for local journalists looks into resilient, or “climate smart,” agriculture, including both efforts to help crops flourish amid harsh conditions and to reduce their carbon footprint. Check out the Locally Sourced archive and sign up to get it every other Tuesday.
Noteworthy Stories
Goodbye, methane tax. Just before a tax on methane, enacted as part of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, was set to go into effect, President Donald Trump repealed it. Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas, primarily a byproduct of natural gas use, which has accounted for some 20-30% of global warming; the tax would have been the US’s first measure penalizing greenhouse gas pollution. By Zoya Teirstein for Grist…
COP30 speeches. In a break from routine at the UN’s annual climate conference, Brazilian organizers for COP30 are scheduling key world leaders’ speeches — normally headline events — for the days prior to the conference’s official kick-off. Organizers hope this will both reduce stress on the relatively small city of Belém playing host to COP30 and offer inspiration to negotiators at the conference as they get to work. By Sebastian Rodriguez for Climate Home News…
Bait and switch. From Maine to Alaska, commercial fishermen in the process of updating and decarbonizing their fleets — to the would-be benefit of both the environment and their bottom lines — are finding themselves hamstrung and on the hook for the money they already spent, amid DOGE’s cuts to the US federal budget. “I’m scrambling, where does the money come from,” said one Seattle fisherman. “I was under the impression that if you got a grant from the United States, it was a commitment. Nothing in the letter was saying, ‘Yes, we’ll guarantee you the funds depending on who is elected.’” By Patrick Whittle for the Associated Press…
Russia’s mess. In December, two Russian oil tankers — part of a ramshackle “shadow fleet” that has helped fund Russia’s war in Ukraine — collided in the Black Sea, spilling thousands of tons of heavy oil. The environmental and ecological damage has been vast, yet Russia was slow to acknowledge the disaster, and volunteers have struggled to restore the area, in the absence of an accountable government response. By Ruchi Kumar for The Revelator…
Closer to the sun. Off-grid solar power installations are bringing reliable energy at a fraction of the cost of typical diesel generators to communities throughout rural Nigeria. The “mini-grids” are improving livelihoods and serving up a promising example for sustainably powering swaths of Sub-Saharan Africa. By Victoria Uwemedimo and Katarina Zimmer for Knowable Magazine…
“Destroying the right to peaceful protest.” A North Dakota jury has ruled that Greenpeace must pay upwards of $660 million to the pipeline company Energy Transfer as punishment for protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Greenpeace, which will appeal, says the lawsuit is aimed at “destroying the right to peaceful protest,” while constitutional experts fear the decision will have a “chilling effect” on protest and free speech generally. By Rachel Leingang and Nina Lakhani for the Guardian…
Events, Resources, Etc.
Information Integrity. On March 25, in Brasilia, Brazil, FALA, the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN), and Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) will host the Climate Information Integrity Summit, an event to “addresses the urgent need to strengthen information integrity amidst the escalating climate crisis, particularly as Brazil prepares to host COP30.” Learn more and apply to attend (remotely or in person).
ONA25. The Online News Association is seeking pitches for climate journalism sessions for the organization’s annual conference, which will be held September 10 to 13, in New Orleans. Climate change is one of three key focus areas for this year’s conference program. Submit by March 27. Learn more and pitch your session ideas.
Investigating your community. The nonprofit Sunlight Research Center is conducting training on March 28 to help journalists sharpen business investigation skills, featuring guidance from a private investigator and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The session will cover how “to navigate government databases to uncover key corporate information, reveal ownership details and financial trends, and analyze records to expose links between nonprofits and business interests.” Learn more and register.
Charging Ahead. On April 9, The UCLA School of Law is hosting a full-day symposium called “Charging Ahead: Cutting Vehicle Pollution in the New Trump Years.” The event, which is open to the public and part of the second annual Los Angeles Climate Week, will cover “creative approaches available to cities, counties, and states to cut [vehicle] pollution … and ways to ensure that the transition to cleaner vehicles benefits disadvantaged communities,” among other topics. Learn more and register.
Trump rollback tracker. The advocacy group Climate Action Campaign has a tool called the “Trump’s climate and clean energy rollback tracker” to help you stay up to speed with the new administration’s rapid-fire cuts and walkbacks.
Jobs, Opportunities, Etc.
National & large outlets. Bloomberg is hiring a climate reporter (Hong Kong). Inside Climate News is hiring a chief development officer. Salon is hiring a senior staff writer for science and health (remote).
Local & smaller outlets. The Texas Tribune is hiring a politics reporter (Austin) and economy and industry reporter (Houston). State Affairs is hiring an Indiana statehouse reporter (Indianapolis) and a Kansas statehouse reporter (Topeka). The Sacramento Bee is hiring a service journalism editor. WJAC-TV in Johnstown, Penn., is hiring a meteorologist. Oregon Public Broadcasting is hiring a visual journalist (Portland, apply by April 10). Common Dreams is hiring a staff writer and reporter (remote). Floodlight is hiring an investigative reporter (remote, apply by March 26).
Internships, etc. The Center for Climate Integrity is hiring a summer research intern (remote, apply by May 16).
Submissions are open for the Climate Film Festival, now in its second year. The festival, “a celebration of bold, boundary-pushing environmental storytelling,” will be held September 19 to 22 in New York. It will include narrative and documentary features, experimental shorts, and music videos. The deadline for submissions is May 16. Learn more and apply.
I-79 Media Consults, a Nigerian platform dedicated in part to media training and sustainability, has a great list of fellowships, grants, and awards programs that are open for applications, some for journalists in Africa specifically and some for journalists worldwide.
LAST CHANCE: The Public Media Journalists Association is accepting applications for the “Opening Doors” initiative, a program designed “to increase diversity in public media newsrooms.” Ten BIPOC journalism students in their junior or senior year of college will be selected for a two-year program “that will provide skills training, mentorship, and paid internships … with a specific focus on science, health and economics reporting.” Both students and journalists interested in serving as mentors may apply. The deadline for applications is March 23. Learn more and apply.
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