How to make climate stories impossible to ignore

So I have a confession to make, and it’s that, for many of you,

you'll know when the IPCC reports come out every year,

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

telling us where we are with climate change

and where we're going.

And there's this flood of headlines, right?

You've probably all seen them.

Often, I don't click on those stories.

I don't read them.

And I'm a journalist,

so this is an embarrassing thing to admit.

And it's not because I don't think this work is amazing

or I don't think the IPCC is amazing.

I really, really do.

But I also know why I'm not clicking on those stories.

And I think it's probably for reasons a lot of people don't click on them.

They scare the crap out of me.

Sometimes, when you work on this stuff all the time,

you think, "Well, we're screwed."

Like, "Tell me something else I don't know."

Or it can be technical,

it can be overwhelming.

People feel like they have so much on their plate.

Why are they going to look at these stories?

So that's a challenge.

It's a challenge for journalists, but it's also a challenge for all of us,

because I think the more that we know about climate change,

the more that we read or consume climate-change news,

the more that we know about climate change.

So I work at the Reuters Institute,

and our researchers saw, in eight countries,

when people consumed climate news weekly instead of monthly,

you know, they know things

like "Climate change is affecting my health

right now, instead of in the future."

Or, you know, "Rich, more polluting countries

bear more responsibility for climate change

than the poor ones who did less to cause it."

But we know that the more they consume climate-change news,

the more that they actually know.

So I'm from Calgary, Alberta.

It's an oil and gas city.

I'm from an oil and gas family,

and I got into covering climate change because I covered the energy industry,

I covered the big oil and gas companies.

And when I was covering climate change,

I could see that I was having the same problem.

I could see that people weren't clicking or reading my stories.

Sometimes, as a journalist, you see behind the veil of what people are clicking on.

It’s a very traumatic experience.

So it was so traumatic, I left my job.

And in 2022, I joined a new project,

called the Oxford Climate Journalism Network,

which is at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

at the University of Oxford.

And it was set up by our cofounders

with this idea that climate is really a lens --

it's not an angle, it's not a beat.

It's something that goes across everything,

And that's how we, as journalists, should cover it.

So every six months,

we get 100 journalists in a kind of a virtual room.

They come from 50 to 60 countries,

and they come from all different positions in the newsroom.

You know, they’re editors-in-chiefs

and people in economics, finance, sports, culture,

as well as loads of climate experts.

And we get them in a room,

and over the course of six months,

we look at climate from loads of different angles.

We look at it from the science, the finance, but also, we look at culture,

we look at sports,

and this kind of helps people on all these different desks

question their assumptions.

So that's kind of a brilliant approach.

So, OK, first of all,

it's not just me who does this work, there's a team of us.

There's my boss, Mitali Mukherjee,

there’s my colleagues Diego Arguedas Ortiz and Greg Cochrane.

And now, three years in, we're at 600 journalists,

and we kind of often say, like when we started out,

we were pretty honest that we just had questions about this kind of stuff.

We didn't really have that many answers.

And now, we're going into our fourth year.

We have a few places that we like to start,

and many of you aren't journalists,

but you can probably use this in your own lives and your own industries.

So one place we start is called Find Your Mango.

So this comes from an Egyptian editor called Suzy.

And we had a discussion about, you know,

why weren't the mangoes as good in Egypt this year?

Why weren't they as tasty?

It was climate change, of course.

And then we went around the room,

and looked at, like, what's the mango in your country?

Diego's Costa Rican, it's coffee for him.

Where I'm from, it's skiing.

You know, it's durian, it's mushroom picking, it's football,

and in a lot of the world, it's mangoes as well.

But it's all these things that connect us to climate,

and we often talk about lives and livelihoods.

These things are so important.

But it's also sports, food, culture,

the things that really make our lives worth living,

and the things that are really important to us.

The second thing is that climate coverage is contagious.

And once you start looking for climate coverage in your newsroom,

you can find it all kinds of different places.

So sometimes, people come to Diego and I,

and they say, "We're going to start a climate desk,

or should we hire reporters, or what should we do?"

And we say, "What other newsrooms have done,

a lot of the time is they've taken an inventory,

and they look at what they're already doing,

and often, there's way more than you would expect."

So local reporters, you know, they're covering water issues,

they're covering city-hall questions.

Business reporters are covering energy prices.

They're covering insurance.

Sports reporters are covering, like, when it is too hot to have, you know,

a kids' Little League game, this kind of thing.

And actually, journalists are doing this.

So one great example is AFP,

where they have a style guide that connects, you know,

extreme weather events

with when they can connect it to climate change.

What's the link that they can make,

which is something a lot of journalists are grappling with.

And Ivan Couronne, who is in charge of the climate strategy at AFP,

is one of our members.

He's also in charge of kind of bringing climate training to everybody in AFP.

And this is something a lot of newsrooms are doing.

And what they’ve realized,

it's not always about the big climate story, right?

It's often about taking these stories,

adding a little bit of context, a line, a paragraph.

It's all about, like, connecting the dots,

giving the readers and the audience that context.

So the third thing we suggest is "be proactive."

A lot of climate coverage,

it used to be the science reporters were sitting over here,

they knew what was going on, they had this very difficult job.

And then, every time there was a climate disaster,

it was over here, bang, bang, react, react.

And we weren't often making this connection.

But the world has changed.

And we know this stuff is coming.

So I'm Canadian, we know the wildfires are coming.

For most of the world,

we know the extreme heat is coming every single year.

And if we know stuff is coming, like, we have no excuse not to kind of prepare.

And not just in the really long term,

but, like, you know, for next month or next summer.

And this is also something newsrooms are doing.

And we often compare it to, like, the Olympics or the election.

So in the Indian elections earlier this year, you know,

extreme heat was a huge factor for the people in the polling booths,

but also for the journalists who were covering it,

who were often getting heatstroke.

But it was also an issue in Paris this summer.

What does it mean if it's 40 degrees in Paris,

which is super likely?

What does it mean for the athletes, what does it mean for the crowds?

So when I say this, I often like to mention a couple stories

that I really love.

One of them is a story called "The Great Electrician Shortage"

by David Owen at "The New Yorker."

And it's a story about how,

in the energy transition, we need to electrify everything, right?

So we need loads of electricians.

And it's a story about the energy transition and climate change,

but it's also a story about job choices and the labor market,

and what people should do with their lives,

and what you should study at university.

And another thing I like to mention

is a little series called "Climate Heroes,"

which is at the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ,

under a lovely guy called Philip Bromwell,

who's also an alumnus of ours.

And there are these little social-first videos --

you know, very, very short.

And they're about people doing stuff in their communities.

So they're about a climate comedian going on the road,

about a professional rugby player turned climate activist.

There's loads of biodiversity stories.

There's loads of stories about local businesses

changing how they deal with waste.

And they're, like, very easy to binge,

and they make you feel good.

And the question there

is not really about "Should we not do the big, hard-hitting stuff,

should we not cover the IPCC?"

It's like, "This is so big now, we should do both."

And a lot of these stories, as simple as they seem,

they go back to something I was taught when I started journalism school,

which is what one of my first professors

would have us write on the top of the paper.

He'd say, "A story is someone doing something, because."

Someone needs to be doing something.

There needs to be agency. Something needs to be happening.

So when I say all of this,

it sounds super simple, and, like, “Oh, it’s so easy.”

And obviously, in a lot of this work,

it can feel like the boundary for success is so high.

It's stopping climate change, right?

So anything short of that can feel like a failure.

And I think that's something that climate journalists

are grappling with every day, what that feels like.

But just because the boundary is so high for journalists,

when we're looking at what's our role here,

and it's providing good, useful information,

can help people make really tangible, really important choices

about their lives.

About is it safe to go to the park today with their kids, is it too hot?

What should they do with their careers?

What does the future kind of hold?

These are really tangible decisions.

So I think when we look at those, these are places that we can start.

We can start by remembering what's really important to the audience,

we can be proactive, and we can make connections.

And these are things that I hope will help connect with audiences

and make it a little bit harder for people to look away.

So thanks so much.