The challenges of reporting on climate change
Climate change is a complex collection of phenomena with many moving parts
Many people ask if climate change is a poll issue in India. The rst phase of the Lok Sabha polls started and ended on April 19; the second phase is on today. More than a few have expressed doubts that climate change is dictating voters’ choices.
Journalists want to improve awareness of climate change. It is clear to us that both the policy and the behavioural changes required for people to adapt to its eects in future must begin right away, and that these changes need the government’s support. My labours as a journalist often come down to persuading someone somewhere to change their mind. This is a laborious task with a high failure rate, and I day-dream how easy some parts of climate journalism would be if people at large woke up one day and voted along climate lines.
Climate change is a complex collection of phenomena with many moving parts. Having its fullest measure means taking a broad view of events evolving across space and time. Then again, news journalists are tracking this evolution and its eects on the world around us in relatively small increments: one place, one day. This is like trying to understand everything about a carrot by slicing it into really thin slivers and examining them one at a time. But between the demands of the rituals of journalism (reporting, editing, etc.) and the messy shapes climate change takes on the ground, it is impossible to capture all stories all the time. Climate change alters people’s access to water, clean air, land, nutrients, etc., while also interacting with gender, caste, class, and geographic overtones in ways that distort its appearance beyond recognition. We often miss many stories and play catch up. In this chaos, it’s easy to lose sight of climate change the actor.
For example, there was an uptick in child tra¨cking in the Sundarbans delta region last decade, suggesting perhaps that some sort of organised racket had taken root in the area. But a journalist’s investigation revealed the primordial cause to be a combination of climate change and subpar state intervention. In 2020 and 2021, the Cyclones Amphan and Yaas — rendered more ferocious by climate change — deepened the destitution wrought earlier in parts of the delta by Cyclone Alia in 2009. However, the state had focused on large infrastructure projects to improve locals’ prospects over setting up reliable sources of income, big or small. So after each cyclone, self-su¨cient communities became less so, and had to deal with this forced transition.
Our determination of whether climate change gures highly on voters’ minds in¡uences voters, politicians, scientists, and, importantly, our own sense of whether we’re doing a good job. But we are also liable to overlook the lived experiences wrought in some measure by climate change and thus underestimate the length of its shadow at the ballot.
A man from the Sundarbans may be more impressed by a candidate oering low-paying but predictable jobs over one who has secured funds to build an embankment along a river. Or a woman in a village may favour a candidate who intends to build toilets inside homes over one promising extra beds at the hospital. This is because she would like to drink more water to cope with the rising heat and not have to venture to use toilets outdoors in the daytime, suering harassment from local men.
Our understanding of such choices will be incomplete without accounting for climate change. Of course, it’s nearly impossible to blame climate change for anomalous weather over a short period and/or a small area, but it’s also true that climate change is imposing such anomalies over ‘newer’ areas and for longer durations — and making its presence felt in hard-to-predict ways. The best thing we can do is to keep the carrot in mind while counting the slivers.