Down to Earth: The Challenge of Reporting the Environment
FJA Series of webinars “Winning Stories”
December 5th, 2024
Moderator:
Aidan White
Speakers:
Tom Brown (UK)
Stella Martany (Iraq)
Camilo Amaya (Colombia)
Fredrick Mugira (Uganda)
Tom Gibson (Belgium)
Full transcript (text generated by AI)
Aidan White
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Fetisov Journalism Association's latest webinar in our series of winning stories. In these webinars, we are talking about the big stories that have won big prizes at the Fetisov Journalism Awards in recent years and how these stories highlight issues that are of concern to all journalists. We hope that through this webinar, we will learn more about how the journalists behind these award-winning stories have put their stories together, how they've gathered the information, how they've dealt with the ethical dilemmas involved, how they've addressed issues related to security, and how they've produced stories that are part of one of the biggest global debates we have today on the whole question of the future of the world as a result of climate change and the implications and impact of human development and human activity on the environment in general.
We are very lucky to have with us today our prize winners, as well as people who will provide deep insights into the main challenges that journalists face. One of the things we hope people will get from this webinar is tips about how to report on climate change and how to make this story impactful. One of the recent lessons we have learned as a result of the elections that have taken place around the world is a big concern among journalists: sometimes the messages they put forward, no matter how ethical and truthful, are not having the impact they hope for on the community at large. A lot of this can be explained by the problems of disinformation and online communications.
One of the issues we will be looking at is how to ensure that there is high-quality, ethical reporting in this critical area of journalistic work. Today, we have colleagues from Latin America, Africa, Europe, and North America who will be addressing these various issues. We'll look at the stories themselves, how they've been put together, and we also have an expert on the safety of journalists, Tom Gibson from the Committee to Protect Journalists, who will talk to us about issues related to safety. One of the significant challenges we've noticed in the last few years is that reporting on the environment itself is a very dangerous proposition. In fact, earlier this year, UNESCO, at the time of World Press Freedom Day, produced a report showing that there is increasing violence and intimidation of journalists reporting on the environment and climate disruption, with around 750 journalists attacked in the last 15 years. At the same time, online disinformation has surged, so we need stronger support for environmental journalists and better governance of digital platforms in how they handle the work journalists do on the environment.
Today, we are going to our panel. We have a really distinguished panel: Camilo Amaya, who is the Project Director at Consejo de Redacción. He has a great CV in terms of his experience and understanding of these issues. We have Tom Brown from the UK and Stella Martany, who will talk about their experience preparing a really important story on the question of energy production and its negative impacts in Kurdistan. Frederick Mugira from Uganda is also going to talk to us and will bring an African perspective into the issues of extreme concern, particularly in the Nile River Basin, where his story was developed.
We will make a start on these discussions. If people have questions, please send them through to us, and we'll try to answer them as we go through the process. We'll have some presentations, and then we will open it up for questions. So please stay with us, ask any questions you want, and we'll see what we can do.
The Fetisov Journalism Awards are, as you well know, the world's richest journalism prize. We've been going for five years, and we're having a tremendous impact, which we are very pleased about. It's really important to begin by saying that the question of the environment is at the very heart of what the Fetisov Journalism Awards are all about. We hold our annual award ceremony on or around Earth Day every year, and we see this issue as an absolutely touchstone issue in which everyone on the planet has a real interest in knowing the truth about what's going on. Our mission is to help journalists tell that truth and ensure that community voices are heard in dealing with these issues.
With that brief introduction, I would like to ask Camilo Amaya from Colombia to make his presentation and take us through the issues particularly affecting journalists in Latin America. This area is very much the front line for environmental reporting and the impact of climate change, and it's also the front line in terms of the dangers and risks that journalists face. We will be very interested to hear from you, Camilo, about your experience and what you can offer us in terms of advice for future reporting in this area. Over to you.
Camilo Amaya
Thank you, Aidan. First of all, I want to thank the Fetisov Award for the invitation, and let's see if this works. I have a little presentation here. Well, today I'm going to talk about "Land of Resistance", Tierra de Resistentes in Spanish, and this is a big project for the organization I represent here, Consejo de Redacción. It is an organization based in Colombia, and what we want is to enhance, promote, and strengthen journalism, especially investigative journalism. This is one of our flagship projects, and it's about the stories of environmental leaders in Latin America and the violence against them.
The project started in 2018. By that time, there were already some things happening regarding environmental defenders. First of all, in 2016, for example, Michel Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, presented his report to the UN Human Rights Council. Some of the findings he mentioned were that Latin America was the most dangerous place for environmental defenders, and six of the ten most dangerous and hostile countries against these people were in this region: Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Mexico.
Also, in 2016, the prominent indigenous leader Berta Cáceres was murdered at her home by hitmen in Honduras. She was opposed to the construction of a hydroelectric dam, and it was a really famous case because she was a well-known figure there. One year later, actually four months later, in Mexico another indigenous leader, Isidro Baldenegro, was murdered by hitmen after numerous threats. He was denouncing deforestation in the Sierra Madre. In Colombia, my country, there was also a lot of debate in the media about the assassination of social leaders—not just environmental leaders, but social leaders. Despite the big evidence and the huge number of cases, the government at that time denied the systematicity of these murders, claiming they were isolated cases.
We started this project against the backdrop of more than 500 people in the region being murdered for defending their lands. At that time, we wanted to do an environmental journalistic project. We were discussing what would be the best approach to this problem. We thought that a good way to talk about the importance of ecosystems and biodiversity was through the stories of violence against the people trying to preserve them. We thought that the threats against these people also reflect, in a way, the threats against the environment too. So, this is indeed an environmental project, but in a different way.
We have seen that the violence against these environmental leaders connects many dots. It connects the local with the global, for example, the importance of the ecosystem for the people who inhabit them, but also for the overall balance of the planet. The importance of these ecosystems is something you can find there. In some cases, it questions the readers' consumption habits. For us, as those who are doing this special project, there is one example: the lithium extraction in Argentina. How does this lithium extraction affect a community that you may not know about, but they say the lithium they are extracting is in your cell phone, in your pocket?
We defined the project as "Land of Resistants," an environmental collaborative and cross-border project to investigate the violence perpetrated against the communities and these people, the defenders. I would like to add that it is also an open data project, as I will show you in just a moment. The project, at the beginning, was supported by the German Corporation and the DW Academy, this is important, and I want to make it public that we are very grateful for that.
After coming up with the definition, we had certain goals for this project. One of the goals was to investigate the historical and present-day origins of this violence. The picture you see there is actually a picture of the funeral of Carlos Maaz, who was assassinated in Guatemala while participating in a peaceful demonstration to ask authorities for measures to stop contamination in a lake in his country. Another goal we have is to hold accountable the people behind all this violence. We seek to expose and clarify the economic and political interests that are behind this violence. There are many actors involved, ranging from multinational companies to illegal actors like paramilitary groups, gangs, guerrillas, and also state actors, armed forces, politicians colluding with illegal forces, public servants, and so on.
Another goal is that we want to mobilize action to protect these people. We want public opinion to use this information to pressure governments, politicians, and authorities to take measures to stop the violence. This is not to say that we want to become activists ourselves; we have a clear line we don't want to cross. But we think this work can inform civil society in order to ask for changes.
So far, we have published around 40 investigations from all over Latin America, in 16 countries. The work is still ongoing, but now at a slower pace. Some countries, of course, have more than one investigation; Colombia had many because Consejo de Redacción is Colombian, so we have many investigations there. Some of them are translated into English and Portuguese. We also have a journalistic special on the entry into force of the Escazú Agreement. In addition to reporting, because this project is mainly about published stories, but Consejo de Redacción is also about training journalists. We have conducted workshops and worked on databases, photography, and podcasting, all free for journalists in the region.
As I mentioned before, this is also an open data project. We have consolidated an open database that we try to update regularly, but it's not an easy job. It is accessible and free, and you can explore it using several filters. If you go to the webpage I will provide at the end of the presentation, you can see the database and explore it a little bit. This database helps researchers and organizations find and investigate new cases. It is not a complete database, but it is very illustrative. Until 2018, it is very updated. However, in Brazil, we have had some trouble updating it because of the size of the country, which requires a lot of people working on it. So, Brazil is a little bit underrepresented.
But we have some findings already. For example, around 50% of the episodes of violence are against ethnic minorities, especially indigenous groups and Afro-descendants, with people from Honduras and El Salvador being the most frequently attacked. People in the group of Berta Cáceres.
But we also have many ethnic groups represented, such as the Mapuche in Chile, the Pemon in Venezuela, the Chanku in Ecuador, the Siona in Colombia, and the Guarani in Brazil, among others.
"Land of Resistants" does not focus solely on murders; we broaden the scope to include other types of violence, such as threats, judicial harassment, displacement, disappearance, intimidation, and sexual violence, among others. You can find this in the filters of the database. You can filter the database by different types of violence.
And also the risk factors driving violence against leaders are also many. The most common factors include mining, agro-industry, infrastructure projects, and drug trafficking, the ones that appear more often.
You can see that it is a very heterogeneous problem, and you can also see the heterogeneity of the ecosystems where it happens. For example, we have communities fighting against the construction of a luxury hotel on an island in Panama, or indigenous people denouncing lithium extraction in the massive salt flats of Argentina, or indigenous leaders in Colombia fighting against oil extraction in the jungle—all of this amid disputes between illegal groups for control of trafficking routes. We have done reports in deserts, tropical rainforests, mangroves, pine forests, among others. It is a very wide and heterogeneous problem.
To do this well, we need a big team. It is a multicultural, multinational team, and there have been more than 100 people working on this project, including journalists, editors, data analysts, photographers, developers, designers, lawyers, video producers, and administrative teams. We have allied with more than 32 media outlets in the region, including traditional media, digital native media, radio, television, and news agencies, etc. We have published in a coordinated way, so participants have access to the whole material. They can publish not just the investigations they produce, but also if they want to publish everything, they can do it freely. This is our way to reach more audiences from different countries.
Here come the challenges, which are many. I will just mention three big challenges, framed in terms of access, safety, and funding. Access to the field often takes us to very remote areas with difficulties in connection. When we started the project, for example, there was not the satellite communication we have today. At that time, it was more difficult. In these places, there is often little or no state presence, and the contexts are very heterogeneous, many actors there, it is difficult to establish where the threats and bullets come from. It is very difficult to read the background on the context that you have there. This makes reporting not just more difficult but riskier.
In order to be secure, we need access to information, but the information about this issue is very scattered. Governments are not very transparent with the information, and when it is available, it is often very opaque and difficult to find. That's why we needed our own database. In terms of safety, we haven't had any threats or violence against our journalists, as far as I know, but we have to keep in mind that these stories are about threats to people or families and friends of those who have already been murdered. We have to take measures; in some cases, we conduct risk assessments, and for some interviews, we have to take the sources out of their territories to avoid exposing them. In some cases, we also conduct a legal review. We have a contract with independent lawyers who review the features to tell us if they see any risk or if we are using expressions that are not legally correct, so we can prevent legal harassment, which has become a powerful tool to silence these stories.
Lastly, funding is a major problem, as you can imagine. This is a very expensive project because we have to travel, and all the features you find in "Land of Resistants" include fieldwork. To reach those places is costly. At the beginning, as I said before, we had the support of the DW Academy, but like all corporations, they have to allocate resources elsewhere after some time. Now, funding is one of the big challenges. We don't have funding for this, but we think we need to keep working on this project because it is more important than ever.
Finally, I think this is the end. Thank you. Here you can find the links. The first one is the link in English, so if you put "en" at the end, you will find some stories in English. If you want to read it in Spanish, you can also visit the webpage of Consejo de Redacción to learn more about our work. Here is my email, in case you need further clarification. Thank you very much!
Aidan White
Thank you very much, Camilo. I have to say that was a brilliant presentation of a brilliant story. The Land of Resistants story was, in every way, a piece of excellence in journalism, which is as a model of cross-collaboration among journalists working together with a shared commitment to the mission. It won our award in 2021, and I believe one of the key aspects of your work is the recognition that the sources of information you use must be above all of the highest quality.
The dangers these days are constantly the problems of online disinformation. I think it’s a reminder that if we want to do good journalism, we have to connect with people, we have to hear the voices of those who are unfortunately rendered invisible. You've described the problems you have when exposing corporate, criminal, and political centers of power that are corrupt and have a sort of corrupt self interest in trying to supress the work of journalists, activists, and community representatives.
Thank you very much for that, Camilo. The presentation will be shared in the report we will produce after this webinar. I think it's absolutely excellent, and congratulations once again on the work you and others have done.
I would like to move along from Latin America and have a look at some great work which was done looking at the problems of the energy industry and local administrations that neglect their responsibilities. This was exposed in the wonderful work "Choking Kurdistan." We have with us Tom Brown and Stella Martany, who have driven this project in particular. Tom is a freelance energy reporter with an extensive background working for frontline media outlets like Al Jazeera, The Telegraph, and New Lines. He has been investigating oil activity in the Middle East and Africa for a while.
Stella also works in the field, based in Iraq, and began her career during the conflict in 2016. Both of them come to this discussion rich in experience on the ground of the issues they are looking at.
Tom and Stella, please tell us about your story, what you learned, and what we can learn from it as well.
Tom Brown
Can you hear me, okay?
Aidan White
Yes, we can hear you. Very good! Good to see you.
Tom Brown
Thank you very much. I'll talk a bit about our project, what we did in Iraq, and how we became comfortable using the data sources we relied on to report the story. Then I'll pass it over to Stella, who has much more experience dealing with safety issues and challenges in the region. Let me just share my screen.
Our project was looking at oil and gas pollution in Kurdistan, the autonomous region of Northern Iraq. It wasn't just Stella and me; there were three other reporters who worked on this, making a total of five of us, along with about five editors. We were looking at something called gas flaring, which is essentially when oil and gas companies burn gas that they cannot sell for economic reasons. It would cost them too much to store it, so they burn it away. This process releases a chemical called benzene, which is a carcinogen and leads to various health implications, including respiratory diseases and premature births.
This is one of the reasons we focused on Iraq specifically, there are many plases where it happens, like Russia, but in Iraq the population is the most exposed to this. This image shows a flare, which looks like a jet of flame shooting out of a metal tower in the background. This came together over the course of 2022, particularly after the Ukraine war, as I was paying close attention to the energy security situation in Europe and how Iraq was involved. Certain officials were making overtures to the Kurdistani government, so we had to look at Kurdistan in particular. The government had promised to phase out all gas flaring by the end of 2022, aiming to eliminate this harmful practice, which not only causes air pollution and climate issues but also results in for the government a lot of money. They waste billions of dollars every year by burning this gas.
The infrastructure is very old, and because of Iraq’s history they don’t have an easy way of capturing and selling it, they have to import oil from Iran and approach the U.S. to ask for exemptions by breaching the sanctions, and there’s a lot of politics involved obviously.
One of the issues about reporting on oil pollution in general is that it requires a very high standard of evidence in order to come to an oil and gas company to claim that there has been pollution or health damages. It’s simply not enough to interview people on the ground to report their stories, no matter how powerful their stories may be. We tried a different approach to this which is to look at sort of esoteric data sources. We took an open-source database from NASA (I’ve got a link at the end if people are interested to follow up about it). NASA has satellites that fly over the Earth at night once per day, they take a photo of signatures essentially, but also luminosity, so a reflective not light. They are not just used for players. They are used for like ice vegetation, forest fires.
One of the things we realized is that Gas flares burn at very high temperatures, they're about I think the only thing equivalent in terms of the heaters volcanoes. If something is burning at around 8,000 degrees or higher, it is likely a flare. So we were able to filter the database by looking at high points and then we found through that where the flares were burning in Kurdistan. This gave us an opportunity us to have a look at the government's program of phasing out gas flaring by the end of 2022. We could not just create a map but we could also have a look at when the flares had happened and try and track the government's progress and see are they actually facing out the flares like they promised that they would.
This was the starting point in the investigation. We spent a lot of time identifying areas where we were interested in, you know, which we could actually get access to and we could do some reporting underground. There's a lot of flares in regions which we just simply wouldn't be able to reach. And so we used Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, as a base where we met Stella. We haven't worked together before, and it was a long process of sort of crossing the checklists of where we're able to visit and who was going to be the most impacted and who we're going to be able to talk to.
So, as you can see from the data that we gathered, this is the point at the end of this graph where they were supposed to phase out flaring, starting in July 2021. They're supposed to do it by the end of 2022. So they did start decreasing, and then towards the end, it started spiking back up again towards the summer, and people aren't using gas, so the oil and gas companies were burning it.
And yeah, we found that people were much more exposed to gas flaring in Iraq than basically any other country in the world, including Russia, mostly because people are sort of very spaced out and aren't living as close to facilities as they are in northern Iraq.
And so, I know a lot of people will be kind of wondering how this is applicable to the work that they do. This isn't like an open source; they just like anybody can go and use it. It does come in very kind of difficult to handle CSV files. But I will say it's some sort of general advice. One of the things we did do is just constantly look at kind of Google Maps. We looked at Google Earth; you can zoom in on the flare sites and see, is this a flare site? You know, you can often see if they're burning from just Google historic data. So if you go on Google historic view, you can often see if the flare is even lit at all, and that's very helpful for just making sure you're not kind of getting the wrong data. There's also open source infrastructure maps, which are extremely helpful. So like as much as you're kind of filling around with data, it's important to go back and just double-check you've got it right. And also, you can use Google for photos and Google Earth images as well.
So these are the three sites we focused on: Lalish, which is a historic site of the Yazidis; it's one of their religious sites, and they have a lot of gas flares, as you can see, very close to those. And then two sites notable, one of which is a Syrian refugee camp. And I think I'm going to exit this, you can actually see how the story turned out at this stage. I can just kind of move my bar a little bit. Yeah, so this is footage we took. If you can see that still of Kurdistan, so this is the flare in the background.
This is all video footage we took in person. Stella was with us the whole time; we wouldn't be able to have done it without her. We approached all these oil and gas companies for comment. It took a very long time deciding where to go, and then we incorporated the data that we did into visualization. I'm not going to sort of spend time with the texts because there's a link in the PowerPoint that will be shared later, but this is just to kind of demonstrate where the flares were happening. And this is the phase-out date, 2018 going onwards. You can see that the flares are changing. And so in about 2021, this is the point that flares are supposed to be phased out, but as you can see, they weren't phased out at all, and this is continuing to cause premature births, cancer, health defects, things of that nature. So this is the kind of window we were looking at.
And so I'm going to move on shortly. These are some of the photos we took. This is the data visualization showing the kind of density of pollution from aerosol data we used. This is near Erbil; this is Lalish, the city, and the refugee camp which is nearby. Oh, and I was going to talk a little bit about this. This is just the kind of release we had. So Al Jazeera covered it. In the end, it took us a very long time to sort of work with local media and local outlets to get this published. That was one of the very difficulties of kind of working with very high-level data, trying to communicate that with people on the ground, coordinating lots of different newsrooms all at the same time. It was covered by, you know, Kurdish television, Kurdish radio, and yeah, we spent a lot of time trying to work with as many people on the ground as possible. This is just some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that we did.
At the end, if people are interested in doing this kind of work with flares, and you can also use it for fires, you can use it for any kind of pollution which involves a fire, basically. Here's a GitHub that will be shared later on with people. Our data scientist, Christina Last, who spent a long time doing all this, is eager for people to contribute, share, and work on it as well. We're very happy it came together the way it did, but all of it wouldn't have been possible without Stella, who was our guide on the ground, who took us to these communities which were impacted by gas flaring. We could, of course, have stopped the investigation with the data analysis. We could have just done some data visualizations and then sort of wrapped it up and published something based on that, but we really thought it was important to go and do some reporting on the ground, and that wouldn't have been possible without my colleague. So I'll just end that there for now and hand things over, if that's okay.
Aidan White
Thanks, Tom. Is Stella able to join us now?
Tom Brown
She was on the call a second ago, she's based in Iraq which constantly has power outages, so I'll just sort of keep on.
Aidan White
Well, actually, I mean, look, what we can do is, I mean, her experience on the ground is incredibly important, incredibly valuable. I think that's really one of the most important aspects of your story about how the logistics of simply dealing with the issues on the ground, communicating with local people, dealing with the authorities, and dealing with the impediments and obstacles that are actually put up is extremely important. But we can come back to her, and we can take her testimony later on; that won't be a problem, we can include her. As soon as she's around we'll try and find a way of putting her in. Is that okay?
Tom Brown
Sounds good to me.
Aidan White
I think that will probably be best. I think the work you've talked about is absolutely fantastic. You were our 2023 winners, and I think this story brought together all sorts of different elements in terms of health concerns, energy concerns, and the flagrant neglect of responsibility by the authorities and the energy companies that were involved as well. It was a really tremendous piece of work.
But again, I think what you've demonstrated is that in a modern journalistic context, there is a need to be able to put together, in a really stylistic way, data that can be carefully analyzed, testimony from the ground from people who are impacted, and, of course, in a stylish way, the drama of actually what is going on in order to ensure that you get a polished journalistic product. I think you did that really brilliantly, and I think it's a testimony to your work, so well done for that.
What I'd like to do now, if I can, is move on to Fredrick Mugira, who is coming to us from Uganda. He's going to be talking to us about an extraordinarily important piece of journalism that he and Annika McGinnis put together. They were 2020 winners with a story called "Sucked Dry," which really was the scandal of exploitation of the Nile River basin. So, Fredrick, take us through that and, again, help us to understand the challenges that you faced journalistically in trying to put it together.
Fredrick Mugira
Thank you. My name is Fredrick Mugira, as you have indicated. I'm the founder of Water Journalists Africa, so Water Journalists Africa is a network of journalists which I started in 2011 that brings journalists in Africa who report about water climate change and wildlife together. We are over 1,600, so under Water Journalists Africa, we have different projects. The project that you talked about was done under InfoNile, which is a geo-journalism project for journalists in the Nile Basin. There are 11 countries in the Nile Basin, so it brings together almost 800 journalists to work together. We specifically take on geo-journalism; we report stories using data generated by Earth Sciences.
We have other projects like the EPS reporting project that focuses on reporting on EPS, and the Nile Basin lives in 21 countries in Africa, so we have journalists all over Africa in 21 countries reporting about the conservation of EPS. We also have a project that brings together scientists and journalists to produce knowledge.
Our approach to the stories we do, which is the same as the approach we used for our project "Sucked Dry," was that we identified the theme of common and cross-border importance. The theme of common and cross-border importance in this case was land grabbing along the Nile Basin. When we identified this theme, we sourced credible data from countries in the region, especially those we wanted to look at. We sourced credible data that is cross-cutting since we are doing stories on a transboundary resource, the River Nile.
After getting this data, we called for pitches from the journalists we worked with on this project. Now includes collaborative transboundary projects, so we bring journalists from different countries together to work under one theme. When we sent out a call for applications, journalists sent in pitches, and we selected those we wanted to work with. We mentored and trained them because we wanted them to do pure data journalism alongside geo-journalism. We trained them, gave them skills, and mentored them as they were writing these stories.
We let these journalists publish their stories in their media houses, but later, they gave these stories to us, and we turned them into a cross-border multimedia project that brings all these other stories together. We also made sure that this project included creative, actionable, interactive maps. If you went to the site, you would see all that I'm talking about.
I would like to underline the publishing and translating these stories at the local level. We never wanted to have a big project that ends up at the international level; we also wanted these stories done by journalists to remain on the ground and cause effect and policy change. That's why we did it, and we made sure that these stories are translated into different languages. We have coordinators all over the region who translate stories into Amharic, which is spoken by some people in Ethiopia, as well as Swahili, French, and Arabic. So we had these stories translated into these languages to reach the rural communities.
The way we reported on this project was through a cross-border data journalism investigation that focused on large-scale foreign land deals in the Nile Basin. Land grabbing does not mean that someone comes and takes away your land forcefully; someone can grab your land through government deals, bribing, and you may find yourself removed from your land because the government wants to put a big investment project there.
This was a year-long project involving almost a dozen journalists, researchers, photographers, videographers etc. that we brought together to do this project. A question may arise: where did we base this project? When we were sourcing for credible data, we looked for different sources and realized that there was a project called Land Matrix, which some of you may know. This organization tracks land grabs across the world, and in Africa, it is based in South Africa. We wanted to use the credible data they had done to find out who is grabbing what, where, how big the land is, what is being grown there, and what does he take the profit, do the profits still remain or they are taken to the foreign countries.
One of the main challenges for journalists in the region when doing such a project is sourcing credible data, but this is something you can plan for at the beginning. We produced 12 stories, which were published in different national media houses. These stories were translated into different languages, such as Arabic, Swahili, and Amharic, and they were published on our website Infonile.org. We also created four interactive multimedia projects containing 12 stories, videos, photos, drawn imagery, and interactive data visualizations. If you go to our website or the link to where this project is you'll see all this I'm talking about.
We mentored journalists in data journalism; we don't just aim at writing these stories, but we want to ensure that the journalists we give grants to can take on such projects in the future. The challenge is that most journalists in the region lack skills in data journalism, so we train them. We don't only leave them to do stories as we want, but we also support them and their media houses to publish these interactive data visualizations.
Some media houses in the region face challenges publishing stories with interactive data visualizations because they lack the resources for data journalism and the necessary skills. We learned several lessons while doing this. We found that storytellers and media houses still choose to go it alone instead of collaborating. It is very important to collaborate like I said in the beginning, these are transboundary resources like you're doing a story for the Amazon Big Forest, you're doing a story for Congo forest for example, you're doing a story on River Nile, these are transboundary resources, these are resources that go beyond our borders. So then why would we compete when we are writing a story on one resource?
We found that storytellers and media houses still choose to go it alone instead of collaborating. There is little exposure to collaborative journalism, and journalists don't know the importance of working together. That's the reason why some of the media houses never care about collaborative journalism. I would like to underline the fact that collaborative journalism is very important while doing environmental stories. Because of the threats, safety of the journalists, you need to collaborate. if you're not able to publish a story in your media house then someone in another country can publish it.
The lack of networks for journalists reporting on these topics means there is no one defending them. In some countries, issues of transboundary resources are not open to the public. Countries like Ethiopia and Egypt make it extremely hard for journalists to write about water, the use of river Nile water, because it is extremely sensitive to write on this topic. Governments will question why you are writing about these topics and your motives, who benefits from your story. Additionally, there is often a lack of budget for taking on such long big projects, not so many media houses can do this. And you find journalists in the region concentrating on the easy to report topics such as entertainment and politics, leaving environmental stories buried deep inside newspapers and never coming to the first page.
I talked about competition versus collaboration; most media houses want to compete rather than collaborate on one transboundary resource. They want to compete instead of collaborating. There is also a significant trust gap between journalists and scientists that we found. If we want communities to make informed decisions based on science, not propaganda or politics, we must ensure that journalists have a tight relationship with scientists who conduct research and find facts so then we can inform our communities to take informed decisions, decisions based on science.
From our experience over the past 10 years, we found that stories on transboundary topics should have regional significance. For the Nile basin these stories should have a regional significance, not the significance for your own country. It is important to respect the history and culture of the people in the region. We need to focus on the benefits of the resources we are writing about instead of competing.
Why don't we look at benefits? Some of the countries in the Nile Basin are focusing on competing for the water instead of focusing on the benefits. And us as journalists, as we write these stories, we need to write stories that focus on the benefits instead of writing stories that focus on competing for the resources. We need to find better ways to tell these stories that would make sure that the our sources remain safe and are not harmed.
Someone talked about that from South America and the way they do it make sure you find ways of how you can protect these sources so they're not harmed by especially the government officials. Also, very important to think about speculative stories and evidence based stories. Why do we for example choose to write speculative stories talking to politicians, diplomats and live out the evidence-based stories? For me from all the presentations I have picked the evidence-based stories that we write. We do data journalism, we use data, we involve experts but also scientists and also photos, I've seen so many photos. I mean this brings out the issues on ground instead of relying on politicians to be the sources of these stories. This is very important question, statements I mean official statements and social media accounts, we found out to a challenge with some of the social media accounts for officials in the Nile Basin, especially when it comes to sharing of River Nile water. Someone will be behind the account and he will write as if he's an expert but in actual sense he's a government spy or maybe he's a politician trying to lie. I mean then it's very important to the investigate who is ‘John’, what is he writing about, does he know, what has he written before. And so then can do a background check and know that this guy is an expert, I can use his info or he's just a politician trying to mislead people.
We defamiliarize stories, it is very important to defamiliarize stories, bring stories in another form. I mean we write these things people know, stories about climate change for example, people know but it's very important to bring these stories in another form. The best way to you can do this for example is to use geo journalism techniques like have seen here: data visualizations, satellite imagery. you have drawn images, all these would be familiarize the story and bring it in a form that some people who had given up will read.
Lastly, it is important to take stories back to communities. These stories never live on TV, in newspapers, or on the radio; they live in the communities where they are made. We take these stories back to communities and show them to people, so the communities trust us. We actually thought you are spies when you came here but you are journalists, we like the fact that you have facts, you took it to policy makers, can you come back and give you more. So then you develop the trust between you and local communities, they will always call you when they have stories, then you help bridge the gap between local communities and policymakers. Thank you so much.
Aidan White
Fredrick, thank you very much indeed. I must say that was a brilliant presentation because it really touched on all of the things that are about public interest journalism, why public interest journalism is important, why it needs to be engaged with the community, why journalists need to learn, to work together, to collaborate, to share experience, share knowledge. In many ways I'm delighted to hear what you've got to say because you actually point to a future for journalism which is collaborative, focused on community and above all seeks to build new alliances and break down the trust gaps that exist between experts and journalists. And I think that the work that you've done founding Water Journalists Africa and InfoNile is just fantasti.c I mean it really just shows journalism really in the vanguard of dealing with the community. Thank you so much for sharing that and I'm really very happy that it's actually going to be shared after this webinar. Thanks for that.
I think I hope Stella is with and Stella will be able to add a few words from her experience in Iraq in the story on Choking Kurdistan. So, Stella, are you there to fill in a little something about your experience in Iraq in dealing with that story? We've already heard in great detail from Tom, some background to the story but tell us about your experience and what you learnt from it, what were the lessons you learned from that.
Stella Martany
Hi, Aidan and everyone. I'm sorry we had a power cut earlier, so when Tom was speaking, I lost touch. It's good to see you and hear from you all. I was lucky, to be honest, to work with a great team on this story. It's like a power team. While we were working in the field together, it was not free of challenges, but we were able to overcome the challenges. However, later we faced a lot of challenges, of course, because we're talking about Iraq. Everything is highly politicized here, especially media, journalism, and the environment. There was a lot of lack of data, lack of information, and lack of transparency from the government and the private companies, so it's not really easy to obtain information and accurate data about almost anything in Iraq.
When we speak about the environment, and specifically the oil and gas industry, it's highly politicized and more sensitive. Even the staff of oil companies are not allowed to walk into the oil companies with their phones, just to avoid any leaking of information about corruption. So, it's very hard to get access to these sites. It's very difficult to legally get access and film in the oil flaring sites. This is another challenge we faced. But in the end, we were able to obtain permissions and speak to people. Aidan, you mentioned earlier that it's very important to stay close to the people and to the communities. That was one thing we learned also through this story because we had a lot of help, support, and documents provided by the local communities.
When it comes to the environment, there are lots of stories because environmental journalism is growing in Iraq in general, especially in the past year or two. A lot more than before, because we've been through a lot of wars and conflict. There has always been mismanagement, weak governance in Iraq, and a lack of strategic planning, especially when it comes to the environment. This has led to many environmental issues and challenges, including water scarcity, the impact of the oil industry, and other industrial pollution.
We always hear about the water problems with Turkey and the low levels of water in the Tigris and Euphrates. We always hear about sandstorms in Iraq, but there are still a lot of environmental issues, and the big ones that are undercovered due to the involvement of state actors and risks to journalists include deforestation, uncontrollable wildfires, and burning farmlands by Turkish bombings in Northern Iraq. Those are difficult-to-reach areas, or sometimes you're prevented from covering them by government actors. The waste management and burning of waste is also another undercovered story. It's a habit that's also growing in Iraq, but usually, these kinds of stories are overshadowed by larger-scale crises. In the case of Iraq, it's usually the water crisis and oil pollution. There is a lot of toxic waste from previous conflicts and wars, illegal building and development in forested areas and the mountains, and converting agricultural lands into commercial lands. These are all very sensitive topics that, for us as local journalists, are very difficult to cover and touch because there are very powerful people linked to these stories that could pose a threat to us in many different ways.
In Iraq, to a certain level, we can say there's a bit more freedom of the press for foreign journalists than local journalists because we have a lot of fellow Iraqi journalists, like myself, who have ended up in jail or went missing because of covering these types of stories. International media has a better voice than us in general, and that's why I was delighted to work with Tom and my colleagues on this story. For me, to do it alone or independently, to touch a sensitive topic like this would be life-threatening, to be honest. But yeah, this is very general from me, and if you have any questions.
Aidan White
Stella, I think you've touched upon the real challenges when you're working in an environment where journalists are half free. They're half free because they don't have a liberating environment in which they can access good information and connect with people in government who are responsible, to b able to talk to them and hold them to account, and where you have unfortunately a nexus between corporate power and political power, along with a tendency for corruption in that relationship, which makes it extremely difficult, if not dangerous sometimes and risky, for journalists to obtain the information they need.
But it's very encouraging that you say there are opportunities in Iraq. There is the possibility of more press freedom than in other parts of the Arab world, for example. I think this is actually encouraging, and you have really shown with this story that it is possible to take an issue and hold the government and authorities to account. I believe that was brilliantly done with the story.
I want to take up one of the issues you picked up and then move to our last speaker. Our last speaker is Tom Gibson from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), who is the EU representative of the CPJ. He also has experience working as a human rights defender in Africa and understanding the challenges of working in countries and regions where journalism leads something of a twilight existence.
It’s a good opportunity to bring you and Tom. So, Tom, perhaps you can tell us why the Committee to Protect Journalists, known worldwide for protecting the rights of journalists, particularly their physical safety, felt it necessary this year to introduce a specific initiative on the protection of environmental journalists. For many people, the notion of protecting journalists is essentially related to the problems facing journalists in conflict zones, like the one Stella is in, where conflicts are taking place. We see this in the Middle East and Europe today, the need for protection journalists in conflict zones. Why did the CPJ think it was necessary to have a specific initiative on protecting environmental journalists, and how important is it to address the physical risks that journalists face while covering this story?
Tom Gibson
Thanks, Aidan. Well, the initiative is on the basis that attacks on environmental journalists are increasing, and they are going to increase more. So, we, as a press freedom community, need to watch this space. We need to mobilize better. I'll talk about what we're doing at CPJ at the end of my presentation. But you mentioned physical attacks. I mean, look, it's not just physical attacks, right? I mean, they can escalate to murders. We have the legal threats, we have the detention of journalists, including those attending protests. We have the question of general safety, digital attacks, which then, part of that is the question of surveillance. What we do at CPJ is we already defend journalists who are working on these problems, but what we can see is that they're going to get worse. A good report as a reference is this "Press and Planet in Danger" report by UNESCO, just because of the scale of interviews that they conducted and the broad consultation. It's very granular, but they have noted that globally there is this 42% increase in attacks against environmental journalists between 2019 and 2023 in comparison with the preceding four years. And that, you know, as has been spoken about today, some of the highest number of attacks are environmental protests, mining and land conflicts, but also not far behind logging and deforestation, extreme weather events, pollution and environmental damage, and then the fossil fuel industry.
Now, obviously, these subjects are tying into broader political debates around land, migration, displacement. They feed, as you mentioned, Aidan, into this question of conflict, human security, and governance. Why this matters is that it touches, as has also been mentioned, the interests of the rich and powerful. Looking forward, we can see that climate governance is going to be a key area for public interest journalism moving forward, and journalists, as we've heard today, are going to have to pursue these stories and are going to have to look at the flow of state and multilateral funds that are being used to address problems. It's for journalists to be asking the questions about how these funds are used. As has already been mentioned, there is a clear intersection with the ongoing work by journalists in terms of transparency, state accountability, corruption, and mismanagement.
Then we have this other intersection, which is clearly a very vital intersection, which is corporate responsibility and accountability. When these are affecting powerful interests, we know that powerful interests then want to control the narrative or to go further into silencing journalists in terms of stopping them from working, stopping them from investigating. I think, when we go back to this UNESCO report, it allows us to see the rise of these attacks. But at the same time, we can see that overall, I think the profession is shifting towards reporting on the climate. I think traditionally, reporting on the climate was the work of specialized reporters or niche publications, but that's not the case today. If you were to take the sort of mainstream international media, outlets are investing in coverage on climate issues, and they are employing special correspondents and units.
This cross-border collaboration question is interesting. I think we are seeing more of it in Europe. But, you know, I think what has been flagged and what is really important to flag, and something that you mentioned, my personal experience is the often localized nature of environmental journalism. Journalists can be working in geographically isolated areas, that they're working in very precarious situations, that they are often working at community level, which means that they're working side by side with the problems and the threats that they're facing.
So, I mean, you mentioned Congo. My experience was of activists working on and journalists working on the question of deforestation and land grabs. This does put people in direct confrontation, if you like, with local criminals, corrupt officials at local level, but also this intersection of powerful political interests and corporate interests. When you're working in an environment where the state is just not offering protection, this provides an enormous risk. I always touch on this, but we need to touch on it as touched on before, this question of censorship, right? So, what is being recorded and what isn't, and what we know and what we don't know.
Again, projecting all of this forward, as the climate shifts from a 1.5 global temperature increase to a 2% global temperature increase, it feels like the climactic conditions and the response of governments are going to be a petrol on the fire for the threats that we're already dealing with at the Committee to Protect Journalists and the threats that journalists face. When we're dealing with this increase in wildfires, heat waves, and flash floods, we're going to have to do more to protect journalists. A free press is also going to be critical for us as human beings, right, to be able to communicate and navigate problems. Never before have the words "public interest journalism" had so much meaning.
But we're going to see that journalists themselves are going to take greater risks because of safety hazards and the unpredictability of extreme weather events that we may see. Then I think, throw that into the mix, journalists are going to be operating in these environments, which we see already, which are underpinned by disinformation, denigration, and attacks on the press by political leaders on journalists. We see this lowering of trust in traditional mainstream media. So, we have a real quadrum here of censorship, disinformation, and increasing risk for public interest journalists. I'm sure afterwards we can talk about possible solutions, but I do want to flag that our traditional advocacy as a press freedom community is going to become more challenging. It's going to become more difficult in terms of our work on impunity, the rule of law, and addressing the criminalization of journalists' work. This is going to be conducted with these enormous pressures that are going to start to manifest themselves.
Also, you know, I think that, as we all know, with states where, well, not just states, where we have problems of rule of law and dysfunctional state institutions, much relies on journalists to make themselves better. What I've definitely seen at CPJ since I started in 2017 is that there has been a strengthening of the press freedom group's ability to strengthen journalists' safety in terms of coordinating emergency financial support, training for high-risk reporting, and making sure that journalists have increased situational awareness. These are things like risk assessments, helping with stress management, dealing with trauma, etc. I would encourage people to check the CPJ website for some of these resources, but also to see how we fit into the broader ACOS Alliance, the Journalists in Distress Network. There are these communities that are looking to protect journalists.
On our website, you'll find, and again, I'm not just here to promote our resources. I genuinely feel that they're very helpful. We have safety resource guides and information that are worth viewing because what journalists need is they need guides and information that are going to be easy to use, considering their already busy agendas. They include things like the digital safety kit, how to deal with online abuse, natural disasters, and extreme weather resources for journalists covering protests, what to do if you're arrested or detained. We also offer one-to-one personalized consultations and group workshops, as well as providing emergency funds. This type of support that we provide is just going to have to increase in the decades to come.
So, you know, I encourage people to read the resources at your leisure. In part, some of this is just a tick list of things that you should be thinking about. You also mentioned the climate crisis journalist protection initiative. The overall purpose is to look at the rise in violence against journalists. Why do we do this? Why is it important? It's because, as a press freedom community, we're just going to have to be better on top of the situation, which means we're on top of establishing what the emerging safety trends are, but also geographical areas of interest, supporting journalists in terms of increasing support for their needs. We're undoubtedly going to have to see more of these initiatives moving forward.
To finish off on that note, my experience shows that journalists can work in isolated situations, but the help is out there, so feel free to take it.
Aidan White
Thanks very much indeed, Tom. I mean, I know that's really, really very useful. You've touched on, you know, again, a number of issues where we are. I mean, I think that the issues that have been raised in this discussion seem to me to show that those who are engaged in telling the environmental story are really, really very much in the frontline of facing all of the challenges that journalism faces generally: the problems of corporate and political centers of power exerting undue influence on journalists and their stories, the problems of censorship, the problems of an online environment which is really, you know, really toxic. And it's very difficult.
If we've got any questions, that people should pose them. But what I really feel in this discussion as a whole, what we've found is a number of issues which come up all the time and are increasingly important. One is the need to ensure that the information that we are putting out, particularly related to the climate and environmental issues, is sound, it's accurate, it's fact-based, that it's reliable above all. Because in this mix of incredible problems of disinformation which exist on all sorts of levels now, it's really very important that there is one stream of public interest information which is emerging, and that should be journalism which is actually reliable. So this question of telling the truth is absolutely important.
But actually, it's not enough. It's not enough just to tell the truth. There is an old saying which sort of says, you know, the truth will set you free. Well, actually, that's not quite true. The problem is the truth may be, you may be telling the truth, but unless you connect with a community and understand what the community is saying and understand the voices that they're from within the community, and unless you're reflecting that, you cannot therefore understand the context in which the truth is being received. And sometimes people may not give as much prominence to the truth about where things are as they will give to their own self-interests. And I think that may be an explanation for some of the election results that governments and media are shaking their heads over in recent months, not just in Europe but also North America and around the world. It's very important, this question of connection with the community. And from what we've heard today, both in Latin America and in Africa and, of course, in the Middle East, this issue of connecting with the community seems to me to be absolutely the cardinal principle for securing trust in what journalists are trying to do. And I think, therefore, this is a long way away from just relying on a virtual environment in order to gather information and to disseminate that information. At some point, we have to have the authentic voice of the community being heard through journalists, and it'll be very important to see how we develop that.
The issue that Tom raises on the question of security and the environment in which journalists are working couldn't be more important because, of course, the controversial nature of the debate about climate change and the environment continues to the extent that there are so many vested interests threatened by full transparency on these issues that there is more, the likelihood is that we're going to have more pressure on journalists in the period to come. So, I wonder if there's anyone on the panel who wants to sort of pose a final question or a thought from what we've heard so far.
Well, okay, look, I mean, I fully understand that this discussion has been really illuminating. It's really sort of confirmed in me my view that the whole question of dealing with environmental journalism, giving it more prominence, is necessary. I think the lessons we've learned here are collaboration, cross-border collaboration, the mix of different media methods in order to present our stories, ensuring that it's style but not stylish at the expense of quality of content and veracity of content, reliability of content. We provided some information to go with this webinar, and there will be the publication of this report. This will be put online, so it'll be available to everybody. And we've also provided some guidance, some useful guidance, which is available for journalists, bro journalists, journalists working on other platforms, journalists working in the regions, Africa, Latin America, and so on. And it's very important to go to these sources of information to assist and develop the way that journalists are working.
Please let us have your feedback about what you think about this webinar, how useful it has been, and what more we in the FJA can do. This series of webinars is designed to analyze good journalism, see where it comes from, understand the challenges that are being overcome in order to produce this sort of journalism, but at the same time to encourage journalists to take on this story. It's very difficult, and one of the issues that we heard about that makes it more difficult is getting publishers to take it seriously, to give prominence to these stories, which are often technical stories, often require the need to understand data, which sometimes needs some understanding, insight, and explaining. And journalists need to be able to do that, you know, with some confidence. So, accuracy and fact-checking, balance and fairness, transparency and disclosure, these are absolutely the key ethical sort of principles that we want to stick with.
But I think above all, and from what I've heard today, sensitivity to the community and to cultures. And a final word, I suppose, is one of the things, given that newspapers, but all media, particularly online media, have a tendency towards fear-mongering and scare-mongering, that sort of potential for creating sensationalism and fear-mongering around the climate story and the environment story is actually very easy. We have to be aware that there is a danger in being doom-laden in what we say. If we say there's nothing that can be done about it, that the situation is too critical, we actually create a situation where people are more likely to feel powerless, that they feel that there's nothing that they can do in the face of a movement which is going to be a steamroller over them, their communities, their cultures, and their lives. And that would be a dreadful thing to do. We have to constantly reinforce the message that people can make a difference and keep people can reinforce change, and they have to take the advantage that they get with access to journalism and access to good journalism to be able to make sure that they are part of the process of trying to change the course of governments and change the course of a corporate community which is not yet fully engaged in dealing with issues related to climate change and so on.
So, thank you all very much indeed. It's been, you know, a tremendously interesting dialogue. I have learned a lot from this particular exercise. The recording of this webinar will be made available in a few days. And I say, I feel after this discussion, I feel even more confident and optimistic that we can actually reinforce the importance of good environmental and climate journalism.
So next year, it will figure very strongly once again in the Fetisov Journalism Awards presentations for the winners for next year. And I hope very much that we will be seeing and hearing from you in the coming period. If you have any more ideas, any more thoughts about what more we can do, please let us know. There will be more winning stories webinars in the coming months. We'll let you know about them well in advance, and we hope that we'll be able to see you there.
So, thank you very much, everybody. Thank you for taking part, and good luck with your work in the future. See you soon. Thanks very much. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Text of the transcript generated by AI