- Journalism is the practical expression of the connection between the local and the global, writes the environmental investigations director of the Pulitzer Center in a new op-ed.
- Looking back on the events of 2024 — with floods, droughts, fires and storms in so many places — he argues that an entire generation of journalists is now talking about climate change and its unprecedented impacts, like never before.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
December 2009, Copenhagen, three in the morning. Tired of waiting for any official announcement from the COP15 presidency, a journalist friend and I decided to sleep right there in the convention center. Me on the chair, him on the table! Like us, others were dozing off in the corners of the press room.
It was the last 11 days of one of the UN’s most anticipated climate change summits. We were exhausted after so many press conferences, bombastic reports, leaked documents and promises packaged with pretty words from the climate jet set. All the problems were promised to be solved. But nothing came of it.
No sooner had we fallen asleep than the closing plenary was announced. Red-eyed, we watched in disbelief as the negotiations collapsed. What a resounding failure! There was no agreement. The countries didn’t see eye to eye and the solution to the end of the world was postponed once again. Weeks of hard work ended with diplomats shrugging their shoulders and promising, perhaps, something for the following year.
I felt silly about the whole thing. For our readers, we were there pulling all-nighters and tweeting like crazy (yes, Twitter was the platform of the moment), because it was all urgent and decisive. That failure cast doubt on the relevance of what I was doing as a journalist. It seemed to me that instead of chasing authorities in some convention center, I should have been in the bush, in the Amazon, in the places where climate change and environmental degradation were happening in real-time.
I didn’t cover any more COPs after Copenhagen and started doing more field reporting on deforestation, fires, floods and droughts.
But did I do the right thing? Should other journalists like me give less weight to UN discussions? Wouldn’t journalism’s contribution to society be greater if it focused on local issues? To point out problems and solutions linked to people’s daily lives and not listen to governments?
While I was writing this text in my office in São Paulo, dozens of my fellow journalists were crowded into a room in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. They were diligently covering COP29 and the news they sent seemed to follow a very similar script to 2009. The negotiations have made very little progress, while the impacts of rising temperatures are accelerating rapidly.
As skeptical as I’ve sounded so far, I think the colleagues who went to Baku, just like those of us who went to Copenhagen or Paris, did the right thing. They needed to be there! The difficulties we are facing in combating climate change are so many and so urgent that we have no choice: we must mix all perspectives. We have to cover government negotiations, civil society pressure, corporate lobbying, field investigations into environmental crimes, and the voices of the populations most affected by the climate crisis.
In 2018, Bruno Latour, a French sociologist who has studied the environmental movement in depth, published a reflection that serves as a guide to the challenge of communicating the planetary crisis. The book “Down to Earth, Politics in the New Climatic Regime” explores the disconnect that has been created between global politics and the territories. It identifies the emergence of denialist and extreme right-wing discourses as a result of the fear and abandonment of communities and workers in the face of climate change.
The most striking example of this is the steel and coal workers in the United States. Reduced investment, emissions restrictions and globalization led to an economic collapse that took thousands of jobs. There was no alternative. That’s why the promise of a return to past glory, embodied in the figure of Trump, has been embraced by these unemployed workers.
Latour’s proposal is to turn to an ever greater understanding of territories, hence the title “Down to Earth.” When I read the book, I felt my mind open up. It seemed to me that the only way forward is to get out of a bubble and delve into the meaning of well-being and how communities, whether urban, rural, or Indigenous, see their environment. For a gold prospector, the river is nothing more than a source of income. For the Indigenous, it’s a sacred site. How can these visions be reconciled?
For me, we’re back to an always central point about what it means to do environmental journalism: we must ask, with complete independence, what are the right paths for economic development?
The hangover from Copenhagen was disbelief in multilateralism, and talk that the UN was no longer effective. This disillusionment fits liberal, market-based solutions like a glove. This bravado that we have to take matters into our own hands and leave governments aside is not leading us to a good solution. Today we are immersed in a world of pure greenwashing, where individual, techno-centric and voluntary actions have become the norm. Doing your bit is a necessity. But it won’t be enough!
The Paris Agreement, signed six years after Copenhagen, was an important sign that collective action is still possible. A large-scale, long-term solution is the only way forward. Since 2015, some progress has been made, such as funds for loss and damage and targets for reducing deforestation in tropical forests. But precisely because the solution is collective, it is more difficult and slower.
I wonder if a new Copenhagen is brewing next year in Belem, where COP30 will take place. A minefield of expectations, where a sense of failure is almost inevitable. All the business mobilization, the civil society frenzy, the inflated prices, the lack of hotel rooms and, of course, the promises… the promises give clear signs that there is a lot of mobilization, but probably little action.
Should we journalists who cover the environmental agenda embrace this madness? Be part of this zeal that this is our last chance? Is it worth it?
Again, I think so!
What I see is that this is a unique moment for journalism, in which knowledge about climate change is combined with the investigative capacity of extremely talented professionals. Our role will be none other than to maintain rigor and skepticism about the ‘magical’ solutions that are proposed every day. Our role is to investigate the details of each plan.
One of the great challenges facing us is to keep society informed about public investment – or the lack of it – in adapting to climate change. The dispute over the money needed by developing countries reveals a split, as we have just seen in Baku. Similarly, the focus on the energy transition and how it is affecting people’s lives should be a central theme.
Journalism is the practical expression of the connection between the local and the global. The essence of our work is to contextualize the changes in peoples’ daily lives, influenced by the rise in international oil prices or the arrival of a devastating pandemic. Extreme climatic events necessarily lead to this connection.
What we saw in 2024, with events such as the mega drought in the Amazon, was proof that, like never before, an entire generation of journalists is now talking about climate change and its unprecedented impacts.
But coverage of the disaster will not be enough. The challenge will be to maintain coverage over a long period of time. Fifty years, 100 years, who knows?
Gustavo Faleiros is the Director of Environmental Investigations of the Pulitzer Center. He is the co-funder of InfoAmazonia and drummer for the band Eventos Extremos.
P.S. The colleague who accompanied my nap in the press room was my friend Eric Camara, who now coordinates BBC Brasil’s social media. With him, I also shared a memorable moment in Copenhagen when we found Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke lost in the corridors of the conference. We were joined at the time by my friend and musical companion, Cláudio Ângelo, then science editor at Folha de S.Paulo, who asked the pop star some provocative questions:
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