Climate Arena 2024

Artificial intelligence continues to reshape industries, including journalism. But its environmental impact is often overlooked. AI systems require massive amounts of energy, contributing significantly to the global carbon footprint. This panel will explore both the reporting and practical challenges of addressing AI’s climate cost.

Pablo Jimenez Arandia, an investigative journalist, will discuss “invisible” AI's visible impact, the vast energy demands of machine learning models, and examples of reporting that reveal the scale of the problem. 

Sebastian Mondial, a data journalist, will talk about his recent work with big media in Germany in trying to make AI more cost and energy efficient, and protocols that newsrooms can adopt to directly mitigate AI’s climate cost while continuing to report on it.

Come join this talk to hear from different perspectives about AI and the climate — and what we can do about it.

How can trade data help investigate new important trends in climate-damaging energy commodities?

Whether it is to show that some companies keep using unsustainable products to promote so-called “renewable fuels”, or to reveal that Europe is opening new backdoors for palm oil through increased imports of suspicious advanced biofuels, the analysis of European and national public data can often be a good starting point for identifying new, unsuspected energy trends.

The Brussels-based NGO Transport & Environment’s (T&E) analysts have been using trade data, complemented with customs records, private market data, shipping tracking data and satellite imagery to investigate Eni’s biofuels supply chain. Other T&E investigations are currently attempting to adapt a similar tracking approach to identify fraudulent cases of palm oil disguised as advanced biofuels.

This session will present T&E’s approach to trade data analysis and discuss its challenges as well as opportunities for using it in other contexts.

While Europe's transition from fossil fuels to renewables and energy efficiency appears straightforward, growing attention on hotly contested technologies poses a risk of diverting precious resources from effective climate solutions, potentially steering Europe away from its Paris Agreement trajectory.  

What is their realistic contribution to the climate fight? Are policymakers in Europe crafting oversized plans for them? Are they just costly distractions and unproven experiments?

In this panel, three experts will discuss hydrogen, nuclear power plants, and carbon capture and storage, with the aim of informing journalists on the realities behind them so you can understand better what’s a hype pushed by influential lobbies and what’s a fact.

What science says is often an integral part of climate and environmental stories. We use scientific work, data, statistics, lab results and listen to the scientists. But it can be a hard world to navigate and to really understand what an academic study says or if it’s entirely reliable. The world of scientific publishing can be chaotic.  

Journalists who are not specialised in science journalism could benefit from quick learning of specific skills this journalism niche requires.

This workshop will cover:

- What are the most common misinterpretations of scientific findings in the climate stories and what are the possible reasons? (With examples)
- How to find and recognise high-quality scientific research and best experts in a particular scientific field (scientific databases; problems with interpreting h-index and citation; distinguishing between Scopus, WoS and Google Scholar; what to do with pre-print results; avoiding predatory sources; how to get paywall research for free; other sources)
- Tips for better understanding any published research
- How to use published research to find investigative stories (with examples)
- How to use scientific research as an independent source of data