Climate Arena 2024

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?

Beef, soy and palm oil are just a few examples of agricultural commodities that put global forests and native species at risk during production, processing, and transportation. There are valuable investigations done tying forest loss to produce sold in European markets. But tracing supply chains remains notoriously difficult, especially when commodities end up hidden in non-food products like paper, furniture, and animal feeds.  

This practical tools session will explore Trase (https://www.trase.earth/), a supply chain monitoring tool developed by the Stockholm Environmental Institute and a non-profit called Global Canopy, along with Selo Verde, to trace the livestock production chain throughout the state of Pará in Brazil. The tools are widely used by researchers, policymakers, practitioners and investigative journalists who revealed, e.g. a large volume of beef imported from deforestation-linked giants in Brazil ended up in Germany.

In collaboration with CLEVER project.

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.

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.

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.