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Earth Journalism Network Trains Asian Environmental Watchdogs

Chiang Mai, April 4, 2007 -- Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (EJN) is marking Earth Day this year with a series of five workshops in four countries, training nearly a hundred journalists from all over Asia in how better to inform the public and policymakers about vital issues ranging from biodiversity to environmental law to the ozone layer and climate change.

Journalists photograph elephants in a river
Photo: EJN
Journalists photograph elephants during a workshop on environmental reporting.

The workshops will not only produce more journalists with greater environmental expertise and more stories on these critical issues, but also experienced local trainers with improved mentoring and leadership skills from groups like the Vietnam Forum of Environmental Journalists. A set of training materials and curricula will also be developed for future sessions. And in addition to learning about the issues and producing stories, participating journalists will make new contacts with scientific experts and gather new techniques into how to report on the environment.

The result will be an Asian media sector better able to serve as an environmental watchdog, and to influence public behavior and government policies so they become more sustainable.

In Beijing, for instance, Internews China will bring in journalists from many provinces to People’s University where they will learn about environmental law, in essence providing them with guidelines in how to pursue investigative stories. Case studies  to be examined will include:

  • Allegedly unsustainable logging carried out by pulp and paper corporations;
  • The controversy over the construction of electrical towers and cables in Beijing residential areas;
  • Farms and wells damaged by industrial water pollution in Wenzhou; and
  • Dust and noise pollution in Shandong.

In Singapore, EJN will lead a workshop sponsored by the UN Environment Program that will explore the links between destruction of the ozone layer and climate change. The session will bring together journalists from all over Asia, which has become a leading producer and rapidly growing consumer of equipment that uses ozone-destroying chemicals, many of which also serve as powerful greenhouse gases.

EJN will also be leading three workshops focusing on biodiversity over the next month:

  • Following a workshop in northern Vietnam carried out in March, EJN will hold a training in the central part of the country, atop a mountain in Bach Ma National Park, that will examine sustainable forestry issues;
  • A third Vietnamese workshop –organized by the VFEJ – will be held in the south, and is likely to explore wetlands and conservation and the potential impact of development and rising sea levels in the Mekong Delta.
  • EJN’s first Cambodian workshop will be hosted by the Royal University of Phnom Penh and include a field trip to Kirirom Province, where journalists will get a first-hand look at several projects run by Mlup Baitong, a local environmental NGO with projects including advocacy radio, community forestry and community eco-tourism.

This series of workshops follows successful trainings carried out earlier this year in Indonesia, where an EJN-sponsored workshop by the Society of Indonesian Environmental Journalists in northern Sulawesi focused on marine issues; Laos, where 19 journalists studied the nexus between corruption and the environment; and Afghanistan, where EJN helped supply a trainer for a 10-week environmental journalism course.

EJN‘s strategy is to work with local networks of environmental journalists to provide their otherwise isolated members with crucial technical, financial and mentoring support, along with access to important information and sources. It has received financial support from the Marisla Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, Ford Foundation, UN Environment Program, Howard G. Buffett Foundation, Robert & Michelle Friend Foundation, the Alumni Fund of the Philanthropy Workshop West at the Tides Foundation and an anonymous donor from the Rockefeller family.

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Earth Journalism Network

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