Developing countries struggle to give climate change coverage

The young woman, with her city education, understands that what is happening in her village is part of a much larger pattern of global climate change. She suggests that long-term solutions may be needed, but her advice is hardly welcomed by the village elders. Finally, with the help of an agricultural extension worker, the young woman begins to convince her neighbours to work together to adapt to a changing climate.

If it sounds like a recipe for drama — a favoured daughter caught between a global environmental crisis and local gender politics, a community holding its breath, waiting for rain, prickly patriarchs and their bickering wives, even, perhaps, an unexpected romance — that's because it is. “There are all sorts of intrigues,” Mojefe Ozeghe, of the African Radio Drama Association (ARDA), told MediaGlobal. “We don't really touch the romance, we only hint at it,” she added. “For you to tell this kind of story there has to be interest.”

Starting next month, the story the girl and her village will be broadcast in a 26-episode radio drama to 200,000 listeners across four provinces in Northern Nigeria, an area where crop yields have dropped and delayed spring rains this year threw farmers into a panic. Nigeria's National Meteorological Organisation reports that over the last 30 years the region's rainy season has become a full month shorter.

“It's not just going to be an interesting story,” Ozeghe said. The serial will provide farmers with practical information about specific agricultural and climate-related issues. During a call-in discussion program at the end of each episode a local expert will be on hand to answer questions. “They're having problems with good fertiliser, so we're giving them numbers they can call to get very good fertiliser. We build all this into the story so they know where to go and get information,” she said.

With support from Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and in collaboration with Farm Radio International (FRI), Women Farmers Action Network (WOFAN) and a Canadian university, Ozeghe and her team of writers, radio performers and scientists are working to bring critical information to a region where understanding and adapting to climate change is a matter of survival.

The Nigerian radio drama is just one of many projects throughout the developing world working to address an issue that was largely absent from the media until a few years ago. Today scientists and economists agree that changes in the planet's weather caused by greenhouse gas emissions will disproportionately affect the world's poorest countries. But as combating climate change rises on the international agenda, the media in developing countries is struggling to keep up.

“There needs to be commitment from the media organisations to really pay attention to this issue,” said James Fahn, a Bangkok-based journalist and the executive director of the Internews Earth Journalism Network, in an interview with MediaGlobal. Journalists in the most vulnerable countries often lack the scientific knowledge they need to make sense of the complexities of climate change and explore links between global patterns and their local impact.

Reporters need to know “how to translate this very difficult scientific and political issue into language that the local audience can understand,” Fahn said. “There's an awful lot of jargon that's used and a lot of very difficult concepts that are employed, and I think a large part of our job as journalists is just to serve as translators between the experts and the lay audience.”

It's a role that must not be underestimated, Patrick Luganda, editor-in-chief of Uganda's Farmer's Voice Newspaper and head of a regional network of environmental journalists, told MediaGlobal. “In Africa, when you talk about climate it means life or death,” he said. “Because if the rains don't come, people don't get food. If the rains are too much, the food will be destroyed.”

With many media outlets in the developing world operating under considerable funding and resource constraints, journalists are expected to file stories quickly and cover a wide range of topics. As a result, comprehensive discussions of climate change and its effects on local environments rarely make it into the mainstream news. A 2007 study by the Earth Journalism Network of media coverage of climate change in Vietnam, a country of low-lying coastal farmland that the World Bank predicts will be among those most affected rising in sea levels, found that reporting on climate and the environment was minimal and tended to be broad and one-sided. None of the publications surveyed related climate change to local issues or solutions.

In many places, including Vietnam, this lack of detailed reporting on the issue continues to limit climate change coverage to boilerplate summaries of conferences and international declarations that have little local relevance.

Yet those trends may be changing. “There's just been a huge growth in climate change issues over the last few years,” Fahn said. “Now we're seeing a lot of interest among editors in Asia and around the world and among journalists as well.” The challenge, he added, is to bring the scientific, economic and political underpinnings of these issues to light in relevant ways. “The role of the journalist is to try and make that link between the global issue and how that's going to play out locally,” he said.

Luganda has also observed an increase in public interest. “We just had a story in the lead newspapers here in Uganda, that we're expecting a lot of storms and hurricanes and thunderstorms in two months. And the amount of excitement that has caused in the public is really quite great. Because they really feel that the climate is going to affect their life,” he said.

Effectively reporting on the planet's shifting weather patterns and changing temperatures can be difficult, and not just because of the complicated science behind them. Issues that might appear temptingly apocalyptic to an editor in need of a sensational headline in fact require considerable restraint on the part of the journalist.

“There are huge uncertainties surrounding the climate change issue,” Fahn said. “For instance, when you're writing about climate change stories you'll often talk about a big impact being more intense tropical storms. But on the other hand, when a tropical storm occurs, like we had in Myanmar with Cyclone Nargis, you can't link those specific weather events to climate change. You can't definitively say that this event was made worse by climate change. That's just not good science.”

Getting the science right is critical to providing reliable coverage of climate issues to the people who will be most affected by them, and forging strong links between journalists and researchers an important first step. Journalists covering climate change “need to know a heck of a lot,” Fahn said. “First you need to understand the global issue, then you need to confer with scientists to find out what the likely local impacts are going to be.”

Even in areas where good data exists, journalists and scientists often have little contact. In one effort to create sustainable links between climate information and those who need it, Canada's IDRC is working with African research institutions to help bridge institutional gaps. One knowledge-sharing project will include training programs intended to educate both scientists and reporters. “The journalists come out with a deeper understanding of the issues and hopefully the researchers come out with a deeper understanding of what a journalist is typically going to need in order to craft a story that fits their parameters,” the IDRC's Mary O'Neill told MediaGlobal.

In his experience building a network of journalists and researchers, “we've learned a lot of science,” Luganda said. “But then also the scientists have learned what we're doing in the media. They have bigger confidence to share their data. We find that they bring up their data without much reservation because they know that we can use it, and we ask the right questions at the right time.”

Article published courtesy of MediaGlobal