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Special Lecture on 'Environmental Journalism'
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Akshit Gupta
6:03
Hello and welcome to our special lecture on ‘Environmental Journalism’ by Sebastian Rodriguez (Editor-In-Chief of Climate Tracker), hosted by the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
6:07
Sebastian Rodriguez begins the session by introducing himself as to how he supports the young journalists and every writer who wants to get into environmental journalism.
6:08
6:12
Sebastian adds that his focus is on climate stories and he will be sharing tips on finding good climate stories to treat the climate change issues from a journalistic perspective and survive in the interview process.
6:16
He tells that at the start of the twentieth century, average temperature used to be below average. 
The scientists calculates all the temperature changes across every country.
6:19
6:20
Giving further insights using a graph, Sebastian explains that there are symptoms of what scientists have found to be pretty much the destructive factors for climate change. The factors include burning fossil fuels, releasing heat, releasing Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
6:24
Talking about the development model, he says that there is essentially a problem with it and that is why the two biggest economies in the world are among the top historical emitters. It is essentially because the economic activities that they have been practicing are putting a heavy load on the corner, which is an another important part of the graph.
6:26
 Sebastián explains average global temperature change through this graph.
6:29
Sebastian elaborates with the help of a graph to show the percentage of gases emitted by different countries in the world. “With these warnings ahead of us, what countries did was try to get together, but failed.They tried to get together again, to solve this issue in 1992 through Kyoto Protocol but failed,” he adds.
6:34
As the session proceeds further, he says by taking reference of the COP21 which is a Conference of the Parties of the convention of the UN that focuses on climate change."The 21 year agreement focuses on how to help countries to tackle the climate changes," adds Sebastian.
6:37
6:38
Adding further, he mentions that all the other agreements made countries obligated to implement certain plans. However he says, they realised that they cannot impose certain plans to all of the countries because they have very different realities.
6:42
Covering climate stories about people, he tells that people should be aware that climate stories are linked to people and should be aware of the things happening. The impact is varied everywhere and for an example, if there is a drought, it may not affect some people but can affect poor people who won't get water. We should be aware how climate change can affect people.
6:43
6:45
In response to another question on the core principles for climate change, he responds by saying that showing real people works well for the storytelling.
“Climate stories are not about the leaders putting policies in place but the people.”
6:50
“Covering Climate Change is about fiscalizing power,” says Sebastian. He elaborates by saying about the political influence, financial drivers and the economic interest.
6:59
Explaining a hypothesis, “Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels,” Sebastian says that they interviewed former company members, employees, scientists that worked for the company and through them they got access to a lot of internal documents which confirmed some things they did was hampering the environment and top executives knew about it.
7:04
Talking about the issues of announcements, members from audience say that they might have issues with capital and where the money's gonna go and income will come down. Leadership changes and if new leaders don't align with the previous changes then many issues take place.
7:06
Giving further insights, he says that the thing to your advantage is climate changing everywhere. Many economics reporters were suddenly asking us questions about climate change, because they needed to cover these issues and their sources were talking about these issues. Climate change became an issue for the economics and the political team as well.
7:13
A member from the audience asks a question on how do we go about processing all of climate information. To this, he replies: “One should try to stick to your guns. You don't have to be a science reporter and you don't necessarily have to cover the latest studies in climate change.”
7:14
7:16
In response to another question from audience on collection and verification of data, he says that data has always been a problem specially for developing countries. When looking at local data, try to at least double check it with the global sources.
7:23
He also adds that compare statistics when you don't have a local number and the usual option is to contrast it with the global data sources.
7:24
Do you think every journalist is an environmental journalist ?
Yes (75% | 3 votes)
 
No (25% | 1 vote)
 
Total Votes: 4
7:28
Another audience member asks a question on the lifestyle issues. Sebastian replies by showing a graph and says that it's fundamentally an unequal crisis. Population is not a problem, right now the problem is the richest people are generating waste which isn't sustainable at all.
7:36
Replying to another question about educating children on the climate change, Sebastian explains by saying that there is no one absolute response to this. Although, he says that young people are one source of hope that we started to feel in the climate summits.
7:38
He also mentions about "Friday's for the future." It's a youth organisation, led by Greta Thunberg, who incentivises young people to engage in climate action.
7:40
He concludes the session by stating that it's extremely important for young people to be aware of climate change.
Do you think it is important to educate children about climate change?
Yes (100% | 1 vote)
 
No (0% | 0 votes)
 
Total Votes: 1
7:50
Thank-you for joining the session. Do follow #ACJLive for more lectures.
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