Climate Arena 2024

Covering the climate crisis at the local level often faces significant obstacles. This networking event aims to bring together local journalists from various countries who report on the climate and environment. The main goal is to address the critical need for enhanced coverage of the climate crisis by empowering local journalists with the resources and networks necessary to drive real change within their communities.

This session will be facilitated by journalists from Italy’s FADA Collective. Participants will have the opportunity to network, exchange information, share best practices, discuss challenges and talk about investigation ideas. Perhaps, new journalistic collaborations can flourish — wouldn’t that be great! Come join this session if you’re covering the climate on a local level and meet like-minded journalists.

Many companies have set goals to become net zero or carbon neutral. So far, only one initiative validates those targets to make sure they are in line with the Paris agreement: Science Based Target Initiative (SBTI). Recently, SBTI has shift in its policies which shed light on the rather weak climate goals of a lot of companies. Until this year, goals that were not substantiated were removed from the databank, without any publication around it. Now this has changed: goals will be marked as removed. This is the first time that SBTI uses an approach of naming and shaming when it comes to companies who had a change of heart regarding their climate targets.  

In this session, journalist Constanze Bayer from Bayerischer Rundfunk will walk the audience through the SBTI and CDP dashboards and the data that can be downloaded, and give hints for stories you could derive from it. As an example, she will show her own investigation into companies from Germany. She will show how many more story lines can be generated from the data as both databanks include companies from all over the world.

Come to this panel to hear about a very recent cross-border investigation Burning Skies, coordinated by Environmental Investigative Forum (EIF) and European Investigative Collaborations (EIC). The project exposed for the first time the big oil companies' direct responsibilities in the harmful practice of gas flaring.

Gas flaring, which consists in burning excess of methane from oil fields, releases huge quantities of CO2 and harmful pollutants in the atmosphere, at dramatic cost for the climate, the environment and the health of local populations, especially in the Middle East and Africa. But big oil companies do not publish any precise data about it.

In this session, the Burning Skies team will explain how they managed to process open source satellite data to attribute the emissions of 665 hydrocarbon assets in 18 countries to specific oil & gas companies, exposing their responsibility – and how you can do the same for other countries and companies.

You can read the investigation here: https://eiforum.org/burning-skies-the-hidden-of-big-oils-toxic-flames/ and here https://www.source-material.org/burning-skies-bp-shell-exxon-gas-flaring-nigeria/

This is a workshop on “discourses of delay” and "far-right ecologism” as new, emerging forms of climate misinformation. Based on a taxonomy of these discourses published in an academic paper by Balša Lubarda, this session will present these concepts. The facilitating journalists will explain how they used this framework to conduct a collaborative investigation focused on how this shift took place in the European far-right.  

In a follow-up interactive part, the journalists will present a series of examples (statements, policies, political decisions et al.) and have a discussion with other participants about how they fit in the definition of these concepts and how (or if) they vary from “classical” climate denialism. This session will equip you with a deep understanding of the new discourses that are floating around and will help you stay vigilant on climate misinformation and apply the methodological approach for your reporting.