Why climate change is bigger than just environment and weather stories

Climate change is a hell of a story for Australian journalism.

Just ask regional reporters who spent the past few years reporting on floods which a new study has found may have been caused by smoke from the 2019-20 bushfires. But unlike the fires and floods, the study published in Science Advances last month hardly dominated media coverage in Australia.

It’s just one example of how we can’t leave reporting on climate change up to environment and weather reporters alone when we’re already seeing climate change affecting journalists who cover everything from politics and business to sport and health. 

Take regional journalists such as those at the ABC’s mid-north coast bureau who have spent the past few years reporting on communities hit by floods even as they were still recovering from fires and droughts. While the cycle of breaking news can sometimes leave little time for reflection, recovering from major disasters takes years, not days, and like anybody else, journalists need time to process what climate change means for their communities.

Then there are weather reporters, who these days need to keep up with the latest developments in the complex science of modelling El Niño and La Niña. A quick look at recent articles by the ABC’s Tyne Logan shows there were several major updates in the lead-up to El Niño being officially called last week, including differing predictions between Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Another major study released in recent weeks showing that climate change is making El Niño and La Niña more frequent and severe also helps explain why weather reporters seem to spend more time getting their heads around currents in the Pacific Ocean than picking fancy sticks to point at maps with, like the ABC weather reporter Edwin Maher did in the 1990s.

It’s not just that climate change makes the stories more complicated, in regional areas journalists also provide emergency and recovery services, as the Koori Mail in Lismore did. When other emergency services can’t keep up with the increasing severity of disasters they turn to journalists — as was shown during the Black Saturday bushfires when people who couldn’t get through to triple zero were asking for help live on-air.

In January 2020 even News Corp recognised that the fires had got so bad it sent a company-wide email explaining leave and other arrangements for staff. It was this email that Emily Townsend, a manager in the finance department, famously clicked “reply all” to.

I’m writing this article with a scratchy nose, throat and eyes after spending the past few days trying, and failing, to avoid Canadian wildfire smoke in New York, where I’m based for a writing residency. Still, as a journalist who often reports on climate change I’m not necessarily disappointed — or surprised — that the Walkley Foundation will not add a separate climate change category despite many hoping it would.

The Walkleys already has two awards categories for business and sports journalism, and within both these beats there are massive climate change stories, such as a former Wallabies captain entering politics and the Australian Open potentially becoming unplayable in January. In business, there’s news such as the insurance industry becoming unable to insure houses, or the even bigger story of the fossil fuel industry’s role in contributing to, and then covering up, climate change for almost 40 years.

Of course, it’s not particularly surprising the Walkley Foundation didn’t add a climate change category considering its namesake is the founder of a chain of petrol stations. But what potentially raises bigger questions for Australian journalists wanting to independently and accurately report on one of the biggest stories of our time is that some awards categories are specifically named after fossil fuel companies, including last year’s Gold Walkley, sponsored by Ampol.

The additional demands that climate change places on journalists, especially those tasked with reporting on floods, fires, droughts and other disasters, show that Australia’s media organisations need to reflect on what a changing climate means for the industry.

This means that we need more than a separate awards category that implies climate change is a niche topic for a handful of journalists to specialise in, even if recognition of the hard work many journalists are putting in in this area is long overdue.

More importantly, though we need resources, training and time to ensure that editors and journalists understand the threads that connect stories climate change across different beats, and help spread the weight of reporting on this challenging topic across more shoulders.

Prominently grouping climate and environment stories on the front page, as Crikey does, is one way to help do this. Not all Australian media outlets have adopted that policy yet, but it would be an important first step.