Press Release

Internews helps Southern Journalists Hold Key Climate Negotiators to Account at UN Summit

JamesFahn/Internews Climate Change fellows interview a German environment official

(December 12, 2008) Reporters supported by Internews and its partners at the international climate negotiations underway in Poznan, Poland have made their mark in a series of scoops that have forced negotiators to take their responsibilities towards the developing world more seriously.

Navin Khadka, a journalist with the BBC Nepali Service, highlighted a crucial two-year delay caused by bureaucratic fumbling in the approval of Nepal’s national plan to adapt to climate change.  His work sparked an escalating blame game between two agencies and led to calls for a complete overhaul of the system.

“There is an inherent complexity to access the fund, which needs to be reformed totally if the developing countries are to adapt to the challenges of climate change,” commented Saleemul Haq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

Another example of the impact that developing world journalists made on the summit came at an event where the Norwegian Environment Minister, Erik Solheim, announced the creation of a fund to support sustainable energy technologies. In describing an example of what the fund could do, he cited the possibility of replacing the dirty and unsafe mobile generators supplying electricity for shops on the streets of Liberia and Sierra Leone.
 
Little did the Minister know that there were journalists from Sierra Leone and Liberia in the audience. Harold Williams, a reporter for Africanews.com, subsequently asked whether there had been any studies of the impact such a project might have on Sierra Leoneans in the generator business. The Minister had to admit there had been no such studies, but seemed pleased nonetheless to have been posed the question, and before leaving made a point of going up and shaking Harold’s hand.
 
Harold Williams and Navin Khadka are reporting from the UN Climate Summit thanks to the Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP), an ambitious program launched at the Bali Summit in 2006 by Internews, Panos and IIED to scale up the quantity and quality of coverage of climate change issues and the international negotiations.  The CCMP has brought 37 journalists from 29 developing countries to Poznan, Poland where the latest talks are being hosted.

“We are more than just the largest media bloc here at the UN Summit in terms of number of journalists in Poznan and reach to hundreds of millions of people,” said James Fahn, the Director of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network. “According to the UN coordinators of the negotiations, who have been following our output, we are also providing some of the best informed, balanced reporting to key countries in the climate change fray, such as India.”

For Internews and its partners in the CCMP, Poznan is a key steppingstone for the endgame negotiations to be held in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. “Every day here in Poznan our journalists have reported on how their own governments are either opening up or blocking the road to Copenhagen,” said Internews’ Mark Harvey. “2009 will be a definitive year for the world’s climate, and journalists supported by Internews, Panos and IIED will be there in force to ensure that audiences in the developing world get a ringside seat on what is being decided in their name.”

The Climate Change Media Partnership’s work in Poland is funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the Germeshausen Foundation, the World Bank Institute for Sustainable Development, the Ashden Trust, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation.

About the Climate Change Media Partnership

The Climate Change Media Partnership was created in 2007 to bring journalists to the UN climate change summit in Bali. The journalists produced around 720 stories during the summit and have gone on to cover climate change in depth over the past year. To interview any of the journalists who attended the Bali summit, please contact: mike.shanahan@iied.org

For more information on the Climate Change Media Partnership see: www.climatemediapartnership.org

After the success of last year's CCMP work in Bali, there was intense competition for this year's program. Of the 1092 journalists who requested information about the fellowships, 391 applied.
 
The journalists selected to attend this year’s UN climate change summit in Poland are from Antigua; Bangladesh; Bhutan; Brazil; Cambodia; Cameroon; China; Colombia; Ethiopia; India; Indonesia; Jamaica; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Laos; Liberia; Madagascar; Malawi; Malaysia; Mexico; Mongolia; Myanmar; Nepal; Nigeria; Peru; Sierra Leone; Suriname; Uganda; Vietnam; and Zambia.
 
The United Nations Development Programme’s 2007 Human Development Report on climate change states: “The media have a critical role to play in informing and changing public opinion. Apart from their role in scrutinising government actions and holding policymakers to account, the media are the main source of information for the general public on climate change science.”

The heads of both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, have urged the media to do more to address climate change.

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