More than 170 news outlets around the world with a combined audience of nearly half a billion people have signed up for Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative which aims to inspire more and better quality coverage of the key story of our time.
Co-founded by US-based Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and The Nation, #CoveringClimateNow will provide a week of dedicated coverage of climate change ahead of the upcoming United Nations Climate Action Summit.
The pledge was originally announced at a conference in April, following the publication of a powerful article addressing the US media’s ‘climate silence’, titled The media are complacent while the world burns.
In it, the editors of the two publications explored the US news media’s reluctance to report on climate change, calculating that less than half of the main newspapers in the States covered the IPCC’s landmark report in October, which set a timeline of just 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe.
They described this “journalistic failure” as having given rise to a “calamitous public ignorance” and concluded that the solution is an “immediate shift to more high-profile, inclusive, and fearless coverage”.
The #CoveringClimateNow project calls on all journalists and news outlets to join the conversation about how to make that happen. Participating outlets have committed to running a week’s worth of climate coverage in the lead-up to the UN summit on 23 September, where the world’s governments will submit plans to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius.
CJR Covering Climate Change from Columbia University News on Vimeo.
“The need for solid climate coverage has never been greater,” said Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher. “We’re proud that so many organizations from across the US and around the world have joined with Covering Climate Now to do our duty as journalists – to report this hugely important story.”
To find out more and join the conversation, search #CoveringClimateNow on Twitter.
