Climate Change Media Partnership
Building climate change media fellowship programmes
Context and Issue:
Climate change issues are facing a huge information gap: the people, communities and countries that will be most affected by global warming generally also have the least information about it. The Climate Change Media Partnership was established to help narrow this gap. Internews, Panos and IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development) have joined forces to support developing world journalism and perspectives from the heart of the international climate negotiations. Forty journalists from Asia, Africa and Latin America are selected each year to participate in a climate media fellowship programme designed to improve media coverage of the UN Climate Summits and climate change issues in developing countries.
Project's activities:
The fellowship programme brings together approximately 40 journalists from the developing world to the UN Climate Summits, where they benefit from training and other capacity-building activities and send stories back to their home media organisations. In the Feature Fellowships initiatives, journalists follow up on their participation at the summits by producing in-depth print and radio stories back in their home countries. Regional workshops are held to bring journalist fellows and editors together at regional gatherings to build local capacity for climate change coverage. A website, www.climatemediapartnership.org, serves as a platform for some of the over 1,000 stories produced by CCMP Fellows.
Participants and Beneficiaries:
The participants and beneficiaries of this project include more than 100 journalists from developing nations, roughly 35 per cent of them being women. The journalists, who work in print, TV, web portals and radio, come from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. The ultimate beneficiaries, of course, are their audiences in the developing world, who number in the millions.
Outcomes:
The deliverables for this project include fellowships for, and training of, at least 40 developing country journalists so that they can attend UN Climate Summits and improve their coverage of climate change issues. The 74 Fellows participating in CCMP activities in 2007-8 produced over 1,000 stories for their home media organisations. The project's outcomes include raising the skills of developing country journalists and increasing the quantity, quality and relevance of information on international climate change negotiations flowing from the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Summits to local audiences. Awareness has been raised among the policy-makers and the public on the importance of climate change issues and the means to tackle them, both through domestic activities and international cooperation. CCMP also supports the networking of journalists, scientists and policy makers in ways that generate ongoing and improved coverage of national and global climate change issues and international climate change negotiations.
"Today, millions of people are already suffering because of climate change. Although developing countries did not cause the climate crisis, poor nations are suffering the most as unpredictable weather patterns and the increase in natural disasters affects access to food, water and shelter. We must end the deathly silence around this crisis because it is a major impediment for international action. Those helping raise awareness of the crisis through journalism should be praised for doing so"
Kofi Annan, President of the Global Humanitarian Forum
