Environmental crisis: journalism cannot be neutral anymore.

Journalism can no longer be impartial in covering the environmental crisis. The succession of extreme weather events that we are witnessing around the world is changing irreversibly the way we discuss our future as human beings. Being against or pro a change in our lifestyle is becoming irrelevant. We are all immersed in a crisis that affects our survival as a human species.

As human decisions are based on data, facts and events and since the mission of journalism is to provide these elements for people to act, is crystal clear the responsibility of newsmen in the process of setting up the direction to be followed by the countries and communities threatened by the environmental crisis.

A survey by Google showed that the search for information about environmental tragedies has increased 73 times since 2018, only in the Portuguese-speaking segment of the public. In the rest of the world, the search for climate-related data and facts has grown between 8 and 35 times, showing that there is planetary anxiety motivated by uncertainty about what the future holds for us.

One of the largest consulting companies in the world, Deloitte, calculated that if the levels of carbon dioxide emissions, which cause the warming of the earth, are maintained until 2070, the total financial losses for humanity will reach an astronomical 178 trillion dollars. It’s the same as throwing away goods equivalent to the sum of the GDP of all the nations in the world, for two years.

These frightening figures are still estimates of something that could happen, but 11 million Latin Americans are already homeless, jobless and dependent on government aid due to floods, landslides, forest fires, catastrophic droughts like the one in the Amazon and extreme heat waves. No fewer than 20 world-renowned postcards such as Lake Titicaca in the Andes, the melting of Antarctic glaciers and the drought in the Amazon River are being disfigured by the slow deterioration of once resilient ecosystems.

Unequal suffering

The numbers are shocking, but they are only part of contemporary journalism's problems. The problem goes much deeper and affects all the structures on which the global population rests. To slow the pace of environmental tragedies, it will be necessary to review the global distribution of wealth, a change that must be fueled by information that will depend greatly on the exercise of journalism committed to our future survival and purified from the influences of interests and privileges.

The British newspaper The Guardian stated in a text published on November 23rd that the private jets of 200 super-rich Europeans and North Americans alone polluted the global atmosphere in 2022 with carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to the amount produced by 40,000 English citizens. The same newspaper released a piece of news in which it cited data from a study showing that 1% of the world’s population, made up of 77 million high-income people, throws more global warming gases into the atmosphere than 66% (5.2 billion) of the poorest human beings on the planet.

The classic behavior of an observer exempt from the tragedy adopted by the world press needs to be replaced by engagement in promoting changes that are not only ecological but essentially economic, political and social. It is already clear that economic inequality is closely associated with environmental degradation. The press needs to face the complexity of the change that lies ahead of us. The multiple issues involved in the discussion should be approached in a way that allows the men and women on the street to participate in the decision of environmental issues that affect them.

Governments need to be more agile and resistant to taking on changes such as urban reform to avoid overpopulation and the risks of building houses and condos on steep slopes, for example. It is up to the press and journalism to identify how the population perceives these problems and together with them to propose solutions that in most cases will be based more on community action than on state support.

Talk like humans.

Now at the end of another global climate summit, COP 28, in Dubai, in the Middle East, once again we’ve heard grandiloquent pronouncements from heads of government and ecological experts, amid frightening denunciations from non-governmental organizations and gloomy reports prepared by the United Nations. But few real advances have been reached in the phase-out of the use of fossil fuel, the first concrete step towards a new global economic infrastructure.

As far as the media is concerned, some positive attitudes have been materialized. The traditional resource of scaring the public with alarming data and situations is gradually being replaced on TV networks such as the English BBC or newspapers such as the French Le Monde with the concern to induce the public and audiences to participate in the fight against global warming. In the United States, the Potential Energy Coalition emerged, made up of the newspaper The Washington Post, the New Yorker and Harvard magazines, has announced its proposal to focus their environmental coverage on the need for popular participation in the decision-making process for climate issues.

Potential Energy Coalition produced the Talk Like a Human manual, to help journalism and the press change the coverage of extreme climate events by focusing on two main axes:

a) Direct participation of people in combating the causes of ecological imbalance, through actions such as reducing the use of fossil fuels and;

b) Increased popular pressure on governments to reduce socioeconomic inequality and promote reforms in both agricultural production and cities to reduce excess use of natural resources.

(Translated from a Portuguese original text with other help of Google Translator and Grammarly)