Dr. David Robbins:

The committee is well aware of the challenges Ireland faces in the transition to a low-carbon and sustainable society and economy. Yet, the general public has no real understanding of the scale of the changes coming for the big systems of agriculture, transport, and energy or of the changes they will be asked to make in their daily lives. Reports from the citizens’ assembly and the Joint Committee on Climate Change have called for better communication to bring the public along on this transition. The news media will play a central part when it comes to the success or failure of Ireland to meet the relatively ambitious targets it has set itself. Why? As the Reuters Institute Digital News Report Shows, it is to the media that people turn when they want to find out more about climate change. Wolfgang Blau, founder of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, says that the task of informing people about climate change has fallen to the media whether they want it or not.

Climate change used to be a geoscience problem. Now it is a communications problem. The question I am most often asked is something along the lines of "Why don't the media cover climate change more often?". How often do they cover it? The answer is that we do not really know because nobody is tracking the data on this. My research shows that over the ten years between 2007 and 2016, less that 1% of print news coverage was devoted to climate. A 2014 report found that RTE’s coverage was low and sporadic. Coverage in provincial newspapers, to the extent that we know the coverage levels, seems to be extremely low. Ireland’s coverage experiences wild peaks and troughs. It soars when there is a Conference of the Parties, COP, or an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, report, and fades away to almost nothing at other times. This is true of coverage everywhere but while Irish coverage follows the same patterns as elsewhere, levels are lower than in the rest of Europe. We know that there is a demand for climate and environmental coverage, but news organisations need to be creative in how they present it.

From a journalist's perspective, climate change is the story from hell. It is extremely complex and involves research from multiple scientific and social science disciplines. It does not fit neatly into what journalists usually define as news. It is often slow-moving, repetitive, data-heavy, long-term in nature and involves dealing with scientists.

Now if you take this already difficult story and drop it into a newsroom that has no environmental correspondent and where the budget is being cut. One where the general news reporters are not trained to understand climate change, and do not know who to talk to or what questions to ask. As we all know, the media sector is struggling. Its advertising revenue has been decimated by the tech platforms. Revenues from digital advertising and subscriptions have not made up the shortfall, so cuts have had to be made. According to Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post, journalists must cover climate change like it is the only story that matters. Just when they are needed most, however, they are least equipped to rise to the challenge.

Over the past year, I have been working with news organisations on broadening and deepening their climate coverage. In my experience, most reporters and editors want to play their part in this story. They want to be able to do their jobs, inform people, hold stakeholders to account, investigate, explain and debate, but they need help. They need help to understand climate science. Every reporter needs to know about the greenhouse effect, about the difference between what a 1.5°C world and a 2°C or 3°C world looks like and about carbon budgets. They need help to break out of the automatic, reflexive ways they have of covering issues, and to see other ways of approaching and framing climate change. They also need help to hire a specialist environment correspondent, but at the same time help to spread climate, biodiversity, and sustainability to all other areas of the newsroom. What we need is a nationwide climate literacy programme for journalists. We need bursaries, grants or other subsidies for news organisations to hire specialist environment correspondents. We need funding for special projects, such as COP coverage, investigations and special programmes. We also need a news agency that can provide rolling environmental news coverage to local and community radio and provincial papers. This is something we are looking at in DCU. The Commission on the Future of Media has already agreed that court reporting, local council coverage, and some news coverage need to be publicly funded. Why not climate too?