Faced with the growing threat of the climate crisis, the media has a crucial role to play. That’s why RESET has joined the Covering Climate Now initiative, a global effort to increase the amount, quality, and visibility of climate coverage around the world.
When, back in 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued their historic 1.5 degrees Celsius report, they said that in order to achieve the dramatic emssions cuts required, we would need “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. We must make fundamental changes to the transportation sector, to agriculture, and to our energy systems – but we also need to change the our media landscape too. Never before have we so urgently needed more and better media coverage of the climate crisis – to raise public awareness and help push for the changes in society, in business and in politics that are crucial to the future of our planet.
RESET believes that constructive, critical journalism has the power to change the world – for the better. We have consistently had climate change at the centre of our reporting, we share news on the impact that climate change is having on our climate, wildlife and environment – but we also explore solutions to those problems. And by writing about solutions to challenges and giving them a platform, we hope to encourage even more positive change to happen – and at a faster rate than now. By joining Covering Climate Now in 2020, we are now able to push even more strongly for positive change, by coming together with other news outlets and creating a “critical mass” of journalists that are doing the same.
Co-founded in April 2019 by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation, in association with The Guardian, Covering Climate Now is an initiative set up by journalists, for journalists. It brings together over 400 news outlets from around the world that have all committed to more and better climate change coverage. CCNow is free to join, and partners are able to access a range of different resources to inform and optimise their own climate coverage. Partners can share and republish high-quality content, make use of authoritative background resources, find new story ideas, attend professional conferences held by the network, hear from and question climate experts and discuss and share best practices.
In line with RESET’s own editorial guidelines, the CCNow initiative believes that good climate coverage humanises the impacts of the climate crisis, recognises and highlights climate injustice, holds political, business and other leaders to account for delivering the rapid emissions reductions we need, and explores solutions – from technical fixes and innovations, to policy suggestions and political actions.
RESET has already shared two stories from the Covering Climate Now network – a piece from The Guardian on the real climate impact of the covid-19 lockdown and an article from AGU’s Eos magazine looking at the huge imbalance between the Global North and Global South when it comes to carbon emissions – and how the Global North has the ability to turn things around. Two RESET articles have been shared with the CCNow network so far, the kick off to our Voices of Climate Justice interview series – the interviews with Ugandan activist Sadrach Nirere and Pakistani activist Iqbal Badruddin.
Look out for future content by looking out for the #CCNow hashtag and following the initiative on Twitter at @CoveringClimate.