Use your skills to tell climate story, media urged
JOURNALISTS have been challenged to use their largely untapped potential to accelerate climate action through advocacy and information dissemination aimed at achieving global climate goals.
Officially opening a media workshop on climate change in Mutare last week, Minister of State for Manicaland Provincial Affairs Monica Mutsvangwa, who was represented by the director in her office, Mr Kennedy Mugarisanwa, said shrinking budgets and lack of public interest had dampened efforts to disseminate information on climate change.
“Shrinking budgets, lack of public interest and the ever increasing complexity and geographical scope of climate issues are just some of the challenges that journalists face when trying to report on climate change and environmental issues today,” she said.
Climate change news can be boring, scientific, complicated and full of doom and gloom, but these issues are nevertheless important and journalists have to make sure the audience finds these topics interesting.
The climate change workshop was hosted by the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists (ZUJ) in conjunction with Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), a German political foundation, which cooperates with different organisations towards shaping international politics in accordance with the values of freedom, justice, solidarity, human rights and a free and social market economy.
The workshop ran under the theme “Effective coverage of the climate change story”.
Minister Mutsvangwa said climate reporting often did not garner as much attention or interest compared to politics and business. She said if climate was made a top priority in business and politics, then environmental journalism would be given the same status as economic reporting.
“The key difference between climate change news and faster moving beats like crime, business or politics is that climate change issues are often a series of incremental developments that lead up to an occasional disaster,” she said.
“Not only are these gradual incidents seen as less newsworthy than once-off events by audiences, they can also be difficult to relate to because of the complexity of the subject matter.”
In his presentation, renowned climate change journalist, Andrew Mambondiyani, said there was need to change the landscape of climate reporting and address gaps in newsrooms so that climate issues were given the attention they deserved.
“Journalists face the challenge of convincing editors to run with climate stories versus a political or business story,” he said. “Mostly, this emanates from bias towards politics and business as well as lack of full understanding of climate change itself and its effects on a local, national and global scale.
“Climate or environmental stories are always given second priority or in some instances no priority at all resulting audiences not receiving proper and timely information on issues to do with climate and environment.”
Mr Mambondiyani called for more periodic engagements between environmental experts and media practitioners to demystify the subject and make people understand its effects.