A recent article on the United Nations website reads “media shapes the public discourse about climate change and how to respond to it”. But despite the dire situation we are in, climate change and related topics rarely make the headlines.

Climate change and news media across geographies have a complicated relationship, one that may have gotten more attention in recent years but is still far from perfect. Overall, the response of most newsrooms to the climate crisis has been tepid, at best. A lot of examples highlight this underrepresentation: in France for instance, coverage of the 27th United Nations Against Climate Change Conference (COP27) occupied only 1.4% of the audiovisual media volume over the past two weeks, according to a study by Data For Good and QuotaClimate on the media coverage of ecological issues in the French audiovisual space. Another example, underlined by the co-founder of Oxford Climate Journalism Network Wolfgang Blau: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a major report that comes out every six or seven years, is next scheduled for March 2023. One would expect to see headlines about it, but we are yet to see them. Ironically, in the same report, the IPCC emphasises the crucial role the news media has to play in informing on climate change.

What is it that makes the majority of the news media overlook or misrepresent climate change? Is it the overwhelmingness of the crisis playing a role in our human bias? Is it a fear of not selling enough issues or getting enough clicks because stories about the climate crisis simply do not attract a lot of readers? Or is it the lack of scientific understanding by either most media or the general public? Is climate change underrepresented and at times, misrepresented because of how difficult it is to understand the impact of the events on both the present and the future?

Here, we will try to give some insights that explain the underrepresentation of the climate crisis in the majority of the media outlets. For this article, we spoke to Sebastian Montes, co-editor at Forbes Colombia; Jonah Kirabo, climate journalist and author at Nile Post News in Uganda; Juliette Portala, formerly financial news reporter at Reuters based in Europe; and Meaghan Parker, the Executive Director of US-based Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ).

A lack of focus

Still, according to Blau, not only do newsroom managers need to be aware of denial and avoidance when it comes to climate change, they also need to “survey their audiences about their current knowledge of climate change”. The audience's level of knowledge has to be taken into account for newsrooms to adapt and adjust their reportage and analysis. Thus, a good translation of the topic to different audiences is needed for climate journalism to be impactful.

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Co-editor of Forbes Colombia Sebastian Montes tells us that the magazine is now pushing articles that talk about the green initiatives taken by companies, in accordance with Forbes’ overall focus on business. “In [2021], after COP26, we came to the conclusion that we were facing serious issues,'' says Montes. “When we talk with economists, they say that energy transition [generally understood as a change from fossil-based systems to renewable energy, such as solar and wind] is necessary but we can’t be irresponsible in terms of independence in matters of energy,” meaning that the switch to renewable energy should not be done so rapidly so as to harm the interests of energy independence.

Montes adds that Forbes is of the opinion that emissions have to be cut down and that alternative energy will create an environment that can ensure our future. Recently, the magazine has been trying to add more scientific depth to its articles. Montes tells us that Forbes has been talking to, for instance, the minister of energy in Colombia, amongst others.

Identification of an editorial focus and in-depth reporting is missing from many newsrooms at the moment, something that adds to the constraints climate journalists have to face.

More from The Fix: Covering climate change: Four tips for newsrooms

Journalism constraints

Although present at COP26 in 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland, Forbes did not send a journalist to COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. We spoke to Jonah Kirabo, a journalist from Uganda, who was covering the conference for Nile Post News. In our conversation, he describes his experience as a climate journalist: “Most of the stories Nile Post News is interested in are political stories,” he says. “Stories on climate and environment usually do not get that much airtime.” Kirabo remembers that when he first started working for the media outlet a little over a year ago, he faced pushback when he was pitching environmental stories.

Juliette Portala, who at the time of the interview worked at the news agency Reuters, told us that she had realised early on that the debate on global warming was sorely lacking in television and print media.

“It is often treated as a 'fashionable' topic,” she says. We have seen that the press has been grabbing events such as the floods in Pakistan, but it rarely covers the climate crisis as a long-term issue.

Portala added that her decision to specialise in reporting on some of the biggest oil and gas companies stemmed from a desire to get to know the markets in order to complete her skillset to become a climate journalist: “Knowing that they would always be the first to be targeted by environmental groups and climate activists, I gambled that knowing them inside and out would give me a valuable advantage in getting into the kind of journalism I am aiming for.”

Seeing the challenges the world is facing, she is becoming increasingly anxious to report on them, but finding a job in the climate field is not easy. "The lack of information is nearly as dangerous as misinformation. I like to think that media outlets failing or refusing to make enough room for environmental issues are accomplices of the climate crisis,” she adds.

Portala is an example of the gap between the anxiety young people feel towards the climate crisis and the way most newsrooms deal with the subject. Her case raises the question of the ratio needed in the media between the scientific facts and the adaptation solutions available to us.

In today’s fast news circle, a lot of newsrooms do not allocate time for journalists to do the research needed to publish quality articles. This idea transpires in the conversation with Meaghan Parker, the executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), a non-profit national organisation in the United State that supports journalists and news media outlets working on climate-related topics.

“The news circle we are in now is, frankly, a bit crazy,” says Meaghan Parker of SEJ. “How do you get the time and space for the kinds of training and in-depth training that you need to understand some of these topics not only to report on them but also to pitch them.”

She adds that the number of stories related to climate change is “limitless”: the surface of climate change has barely been scratched because of all the constraints imposed on journalists.

More from The Fix: How to make your journalism more constructive in 2023: free one-year guide

Allowing for collaboration

With a topic that impacts the whole world, the whole world has to be included in the discussion. Milou Dirkx, journalism network manager at Clean Energy Wire (CLEW, a Berlin-based network that aims to facilitate journalism about the energy transition in Germany and other countries) was speaking at a symposium at the Assises du Journalisme in Bruxelles (“Journalism in Europe and the climate emergency”). She said that a cross-border and collaborative mindset is necessary to ensure a better quality of climate journalism in the future. “This topic does not stop at borders,” she told the panel.

Kirabo of Uganda says that things are changing. “We have quite a few upcoming climate journalists, which was not the case before,” he says. “If I am to compare where we are now from where it was when I started in 2018 and 2019, I would say we are seeing an upper trend. Many journalists are getting more and more interested in covering the environment.”

The media world has a great responsibility in the fight against climate change: climate journalism now needs to be a part of every journalistic beat in the future, because climate change is already impacting and will further impact every human activity, from food to heating, travelling to working. One important question remains: how neutral do journalists reporting on climate have to be in a world where the debate on the inaction of governments is fierce?

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