This article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.
“I CALL ON ALL LEADERS WORLDWIDE to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their own countries until carbon neutrality is reached.” So said United Nations Secretary General Antรณnio Guterres in his speech to the Climate Ambition Summit on December 12, the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Guterres’s appeal seemed aimed at leaders of national governments; the Secretary General noted that “thirty-eight countries have already” made such declarations [among them, such big emitters as the United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada]. But it’s time for media leaders to declare a State of Climate Emergency as well.
Journalists and news executives in charge of newspapers, TV, and radio programs exercise a profound influence over how the public thinks and feels about the defining problem of our time—and what, if anything, governments, businesses, and other powerful actors end up doing about it. Shouldn’t news organizations be telling the unvarnished truth about the climate problem and, not least, its solutions?
Among major news organizations, only The Guardian has thus far made the kind of climate-emergency declaration the UN Secretary General urges.
On October 16, 2019, the newspaper issued a statement from Katharine Viner, its editor in chief, promising “to provide journalism that shows leadership, urgency, authority, and gives the climate emergency the sustained attention and prominence it deserves.” A month later, the Oxford Dictionaries named “climate emergency” its word of the year for 2019, partly in recognition of the hundreds of cities, towns, and countries that had declared such emergencies. Yet news organizations have held back.
Some of my media colleagues will feel uneasy about taking such a step, fearing that this would cross the line between journalism and advocacy. That is a serious, understandable concern—after all, activists from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future movement, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement, among others, have all repeatedly invoked the “climate emergency” as a rallying cry to demand a rapid decarbonization of the world’s economies.
But here is a companion fact that too many newsrooms seem unaware of—or, worse, ignore: it’s not just activists who talk about a “climate emergency.” As this column has mentioned more than once, more than eleven thousand leading scientists have expressly chosen the phrase “climate emergency” to describe the situation currently facing our civilization. Skeptical journalists should bear in mind that scientists tend to be data-driven, rationally inclined individuals who generally shun emotionally charged words.
