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climate change is a systemic challenge, but most news organizations are still treating it only as a topic

It is always a good start to build a climate desk, and news organizations need climate specialists. But they are no substitute for increasing the climate literacy, or climate fluency, of all desks.

many editors think of climate journalism as crisis reporting.  And while it is important to cover extreme weather events, they are still only the breaking news surface of something much more profound and systemic

There are so many important and interesting stories just on climate adaptation alone that you would overlook as an editor when you reduce climate journalism only to breaking news and crisis reporting.      

Public broadcasters in Europe have an unrivalled responsibility to get it right, because they are comparatively well-funded. In addition, they tend to be their country's most-trusted news organization. Especially when it comes to climate journalism, an audience’s trust in a news organization is a hugely important ingredient.  Sometimes I have been struck by the timidity of public service media. Yes, they are under growing political pressure in many countries. But to preemptively capitulate is not a strategy.

All it took for the last IPCC report to be washed out of the news cycle within hours was an actor misbehaving at the Oscars. It had taken seven years to produce that report.

energy literacy is a core aspect of climate journalism and it seems the war in Ukraine has also heightened the world’s awareness for just how integral energy is to our societies and economies. A next phase in this realization may be that the much-needed shift to renewable energies will come with its own new set of geopolitical dependencies

The location of the denial has shifted. It has shifted from denying climate science, and specifically that climate change since the pre-industrial age is human-made to denying how urgent our situation is and how little time we have left to avoid a much more dramatic course of events. The willingness to embrace the time pressure we are under is part of climate literacy. 

I have never heard a young journalist say ‘I am somehow glad I won’t live long enough to see the worst effects of climate change’ while I have seen quite a few older colleagues express such sentiments. Some of them were even middle-aged, which makes me think they never looked at an IPCC report.      

I have met the CEOs of very large global companies who had deep knowledge of the climate crisis while I have yet to meet just one chief editor with a similar degree of climate knowledge

It is the nature of the climate crisis, though, to move faster than most of us think. I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see a major news organization re-organize itself around the climate crisis as their organizational axis.