The Climate Story, Haze Season and Humanitarian Disasters Around Us
We’ve just had a fruitful webinar about telling the climate story in news, and framing it as multi-beat issue and a storytelling lens – making it the context for the world we live in today. The recording of ‘The Climate Story: Connecting the Dots’ (14 Nov) is here.
We talked about how we frame climate, the language we use, the editorial investments we make or can create – and key points to follow around COP-28 (which starts end of November) and issues relevant to Southeast Asia and developing countries like ours.
We’ll be sharing a summary of the discussion on bringing climate much higher up in the Southeast Asia’s media agenda. Meantime, here are the four points I shared for ‘rethinking climate’ in news:
Keep up with climate issues – it’s our job.
Free the climate story from the boundaries of ‘environment’, ‘science‘ (and your own barriers).
Data are our friends. Unpack big terms, and make the planetary personal too.
Stay curious.
Reporting climate and how journalists can be, and should be, more useful in addressing our existential crisis is also the focus of our conversation with Kunda Dixit, publisher of ‘Nepali Times’, on the recently released third edition of his book, ‘Dateline Earth: Journalism As If the Planet Mattered’.
We have a story about haze in Southeast Asia — mainly haze season for countries in maritime/southern ASEAN due to Indonesian fires – from an interview with Universiti Malaya’s Helena Varkkey. (Here in mainland Southeast Asia, it’s soon our turn for the haze. Since about a week or two ago, our apps have been alerting us to poorer air quality.)
It’s also a time of humanitarian strife and human suffering.
The anti-junta offensive by a group of three ethnic groups, together called Operation Brotherhood, continues in Myanmar’s northern Shan state and other areas. Two weeks after this escalation of conflict, nearly 50,000 people were displaced, the United Nations says - and brings the total of internally displaced people since the February 2021 to over 2 million people.
Then there is Israel’s war on Gaza, among the world’s worries that are hard not to imbibe.
Thailand and the Philippines have major numbers of migrant workers in Israel, and since the 7 Oct attacks by Hamas, both have been repatriating nationals. Many Thais work in kibbutzim, as part of Israel’s efforts to reduce the number of Palestinian workers in its agricultural sector. As of 10 Nov, Thailand’s foreign ministry reported 39 Thai nationals dead, 4 injured and in hospitals and 25 Thais among the more than 200 people being held as hostages in Gaza. As of 4 Nov, the Thai government has brought back 7,740 persons in more than 35 evacuation flights. (There were some 30,000 Thai workers in Israel before the crisis, official estimates say.)
News spaces and social media have been minefields, and journalists have been debating bias and other issues around reporting.
Context is crucial for more understanding, but gets caught in the fog of anger (behind which is pain and inter-generational trauma, among others). But as in individual trauma, a question to ask is: What happened to you (before)? In ‘Clickworthy’ below are links to the news aspect of the tragedy in the Middle East. These are times to pause and check before sharing information, and to widen the variety of our news sources.
The 7 Oct violent attacks, killings and abductions in Israel and the catastrophe of civilians being killed in Gaza in response feel like what the Buddhist teacher, psychologist and author Jack Kornfield calls “the kind of suffering that leads to more suffering”.
Johanna Son | Reporting Asean editor/founder
1 S is for Sustainability
Click to watch our webinar: ‘The Climate Story: Connecting the Dots’
Climate Crisis: ‘Is the role of media to make people more hopeless? We have to turn helplessness into solutions’ (audio with transcript and photos)
“They (audiences) should be feeling that what you have to say is credible, that you are pointing out what the problems are, but you're also saying that there are people who have solutions and we have to listen to them. Because otherwise, is the role of media to make people more hopeless? And you know, without any, any kind of hope for the future, then you might as well just give up. What's the point?” - Kunda Dixit
‘Haze is not high among the list of concerns because of its seasonal nature’
Haze has been a chronic problem for Southeast Asia over nearly three decades. Reporting Asean’s Johanna Son talks to Dr Helena Varkkey about how the conversation around haze, and fires that cause them, is changing, and the challenges to Asean’s management of a touchy issue.
Peatlands Seen Through the Haze
Talking about Southeast Asia’s haze means talking about its peatlands, most of which are in Indonesia. Peatlands are often discussed in the context of fires and the haze, but are also a meaningful part of the conversation about the climate crisis in an already too-hot planet.
Laos: Taking the Homegrown Way to Self-reliance in Food
By VANNAPHONE SITTHIRATH
At a time of rising living costs, these two farms’ ways of organic farming and producing food offer ideas around greater self-reliance and living with nature, instead of just taking from it.