Climate Arena 2024

From logging to agricultural land conversion, human activities on land significantly impact the global cycles of greenhouse gases. As a result, not only does it affect the climate, but also plants, mammals, birds, lichens and fungi.  

But these complex "cause and effect" relationships are difficult to grasp, making it challenging to get a big picture and report on them effectively. More than ever before, we need a "systems" way of looking at the complex relationships between climate, land use and biodiversity to dissect how they are influenced by human actions and driven by factors like the international trade.

This session will feature scientists working on these issues and -interactively- unfold some of this complexity using systems thinking tools, and discuss how journalists can report on these pressing matters.

In collaboration with CLEVER and DETECT projects.

The EU has been pedalling back on the Green Deal and now the Parliament has shifted more to the right. What’s next? Come hear from two experienced journalists and a lobby expert about what to watch out for in the next EU legislative term in the context of chemicals.  

Where will the EU be focusing on after indefinitely shelving the REACH revision that would regulate companies on toxic chemicals? How does the legislative process work on climate regulations at the EU level? What will be the lobbyists to watch out for and how do they operate? What is the corporate playbook and what should journalist be aware of?

Food production is a leading cause of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and premature deaths, but it is also a major victim of the climate crisis. This is the result of decades of corporate consolidation, a myopic focus on efficiency and productivity, and an over-reliance on techno-fixes. Big Agriculture resists changes that the public supports, with a playbook similar to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.

Much of this is hidden from us by complexity and a lack of media attention. But investigative reporters can play a critical role in changing this by using data, FOIA, and open source tools. Lighthouse Reports' Food Systems Newsroom will lead a discussion about how innovative techniques and collaborative methodologies can invigorate food reporting, helping journalists to reframe consumer-oriented reporting into narrative-driven stories about a broken system and how it can be changed.

Intensive animal farming is a huge climate matter. Its mass scale contributes heavily on emissions and its impact destroys groundwater resources and soil. At the same time, animals themselves are suffering both human actions and the effects of climate crisis. The majority of Europeans are in full support of stringent regulations on animal welfare but there is intensive lobbying effort that succeeds in shutting down any efforts.  

Animals are an alarmingly underreported topic in the media. In this panel, two journalists with extensive experience on writing on these issues will explain how the system works, where the stories are, and the best practices on reporting on animal-related issues in Europe.

Countries across the world have committed to be Net Zero by 2050 or sooner, but real climate action happens at the lower levels of governance. How can journalists find the data they need on local and regional action and untangle the web of relationships and responsibilities on climate adaptation? And how to interpret these?

In Germany, a team of over 20 journalists created the first comprehensive fact base on climate adaptation in Germany. With expert advice from TU Dortmund University and through surveys, the team analysed whether all 400 German districts, independent cities and regional associations were prepared for extreme weather events like heat, drought, heavy rain and flood.

In the UK, the NGO mySociety, in partnership with Climate Emergency UK, has wrangled data from the UK’s 395 local governments for the last three years to develop a comprehensive picture of the UK’s climate ambition and progress.

In this session, they will tell you how you can collect this type of information in your own country, deal with (big & dirty) data, collaborate with civil society and/or scientists, and how you can write your adaptation stories so they make sense.

Come join us for a dive into the murky world of plastics. There is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation around plastics recycling among the public, but even among journalists too. In this session, you’ll hear two journalists who worked on this topic discussing the inner workings of the plastics industry, the lobbying against regulations, and how plastics offsetting became the new license for the industry to pollute even more. They will share their work, their methods and what to look out for if you want to investigate this big topic.

The recent European Parliament elections marked a shift to the right, with right-wing populist parties gaining seats across the EU. This has sparked concerns that these parties are increasingly leveraging polarising debates over climate action, pressuring mainstream parties to scale back their environmental ambitions. In some countries where they are not in government, right-wing populists are positioning themselves as the most viable opposition, challenging the political landscape.

While much of the media coverage has focused on the rise and electoral success of these populist parties and their climate-skeptic views, there has been less attention on the concrete implications for climate action when such parties come to power.

This panel will have Clean Energy Wire and DeSmog talking about their work in tracking, collecting and reporting on misinformation. DeSmog will discuss how they developed tools to track climate-related misinformation before the EU elections and their lessons learned, as well as how they structured a cross-border investigation on the issue. Clean Energy Wire will explain practical strategies for reporting on these developments, offering insights on how to cover the intersection of climate policy and populism without legitimising or normalising far-right ideologies.

This session puts the focus on the agribusiness industry. More specifically, the panellists will discuss ways to investigate industrial meat production’s impact (which is huge and ugly) and methane emissions (which is the second most abundant greenhouse gas).  

GIJN’s resource centre director Nikolia Apostolou will talk about why methane matters, how journalist can cover methane emissions, where to find data sources, how to investigate (flawed) measurement systems, and how to find methane emitters on the ground and from the sky. She will also discuss how to critically assess disclosures and commitments by companies.

Journalists Jonas Seufert and Marie Bröckling will talk about their work on the hidden environmental costs of industrial slaughterhouses and how they use cheap public water in Germany. Their investigation involves large meat processing companies with further production facilities in Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Poland, UK, France, Austria or Italy. They will explain how they collected data through FOIA and EIA requests and how they connected data to on-the-ground reporting.

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/

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.

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.

How do you communicate big numbers, extreme events, and (bad) future prospects to your audience? How do you effectively deliver the news to communities that are most affected? Or to a younger generation? These are challenges that all journalists face but if your beat is climate and the environment, you might be feeling the pressure more.  

Come to this panel to hear from three journalists about their experiences, their methods, and their lessons learnt.

Iliana Papangeli will talk about how their recent popular story which involved an unconventional approach to writing about (and recording) bird hunting, Mauricio Ferro will talk about how they created Brazil’s first app-newsroom to deliver stories to news desserts, and Sophia Smith Galer will give you tips and tricks about how to make punchy and informative TikTok videos to capture the attention of hundreds of thousands of people (yes even with climate stories!).