By Johanna Mack, Sara Namusoga-Kale, Merle van Berkum, Enoch Sithole, & Susanne Fengler
Even though climate change has emerged as the key global challenge, and climate coverage is at the top of the media’s agenda in many countries, it is not yet a consistent part of journalism education across continents.
In our most recent exploratory study, jointly conducted by the European Journalism Observatory (EJO) and the African Journalism Educators Network (AJEN) in 2024 two-thirds of international journalism educators responding said their institutes did not offer courses on how to cover climate change.
This results in a lack of skills among journalists, which might impact newsrooms and also affect public debates. Media professionals without adequate training and knowledge might be more vulnerable to strategic communication from the many national and international stakeholders in the field, from industry to NGOs.
Our results are consistent for Europe – where industrial countries are responsible for considerable amounts of emissions, and now also experience climate-change-related disasters more frequently – as well as for Africa, where a large share of the world’s population lives and is directly affected by climate change. In many cases, climate change forces Africans to migrate.
While most journalism educators think climate change is sufficiently represented in the media of their countries (the European more than the African respondents), survey participants in both continents agreed that it is not yet sufficiently represented in journalism education. In general, only 35% answered that their institution’s curriculum includes coverage of climate change and its consequences in courses or training programmes, while 64% said the curriculum does not include these topics. In Europe and Africa, the ratio is fairly similar with 64% according to the European and 68% according to the African participants.
If included in the curriculum, climate change reporting appeared more often at the bachelor’s than at the master’s level. In those cases, 60% of occurrences were in mandatory classes and 40% on a voluntary level. Courses that dealt with climate change reporting were sometimes general classes, for example, on general broadcasting and reporting. However, the topic also appeared more in specialised courses such as science journalism, development journalism or environmental studies. In some cases, the respondents reported that it was taught by guest lecturers or in specific workshops.
The participants mentioned different reasons why the topic is not yet included. A lack of flexibility in the curriculum, lack of training of teachers, and lack of resources were stated as the most prominent reasons. However, also a lack of interest amongst either the media or students was mentioned, as well as a lack of political freedom; and finally, the issue that climate change is only one of several important topics that could be tackled in journalism education.
Our quantitative EJO/AJEN research confirms a prior quantitative 2024 study by Dr. Merle van Berkum from City University, London, now senior researcher at the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism, indicating that a recurring challenge in climate change reporting across multiple countries is the lack of knowledge or training, followed closely by insufficient resources. In this study, journalists from Nigeria, South Africa, Germany, as well as the US all reported resource constraints as a significant barrier to comprehensive and progressive climate change reporting.
Spotlight on African media: COP29 coverage in Uganda
The recently concluded COP29 meeting in Baku provides an example of how relevant climate change is to politics in Africa and Europe. Events of political importance usually trigger peaks in the amount of climate change reporting. The coverage of the conference also revealed challenges that the media are grappling with when it comes to climate change reporting.
Taking Uganda as a case study, COP29 received fair coverage in the local press, with 24 articles published by the two leading dailies (New Vision and Daily Monitor) over the 12 days. These included news articles as well as opinions and letters. The topics ranged from the climate financing debate to commentary explaining what Uganda’s priorities at the COP29 should be. The New Vision, which is also a government-owned newspaper, even introduced the COP29 beat.
Worth noting is that most of the articles (17) were sourced from international news agencies while only a handful (8) were written by local journalists. Although one could argue that newsrooms in Africa, and Uganda specifically cannot afford to send journalists to international events such as COP29, it also speaks to the observation that East African journalists struggle to report climate change, according to UK freelance journalist, Laura Oliver. Other authors such as Jackline Lidubwi and George Wamwea have argued that this was evident in news reports that use generic stories and a global perspective as opposed to a local angle. In addition, the journalists lack access to climate change experts, but most importantly, they lack the necessary training to enable them to specialise in climate and environmental reporting, which is locally relevant.
A lack of “climate literacy”: Most pressing among most vulnerable
Academic analyses on climate change reporting in Africa confirm this impression. Various studies on climate change journalism and overall communication of the subject in Africa have revealed that the issue is poorly communicated by the media and other stakeholders, such as governments, non-governmental organisations, the private sector, and the scientific community. According to Van Berkum, the environment beat has even been described by African journalists as “the poor people’s beat”, lacking not only financial support but also recognition. All this leads to insufficient coverage of climate change. Untrained reporters covering scientifically dense topics could inadvertently draw incorrect conclusions. Climate change reporting requires not just basic resources but also advanced, “evocative storytelling methods” to effectively communicate complex scientific issues and contexts.
As a result, public understanding of climate change can be below 50% in some countries on the African continent. In May 2024, the African Climate Wire reported a continental-scale study of climate change literacy rates across Africa which showed that public understanding of the subject was low at a mere 23% to 66% of the population across 33 African countries.
The report added that climate literacy was particularly insufficient for population groups that are already more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as the poor, children and women. Dr. Enoch Sithole, Executive Director of the Institute for Climate Change Communication in South Africa, says: “communication on the continent is very low, hence, public understanding is also very low. We have shocking data here in South Africa: only 12% of the South African population can comfortably talk about climate change. 52% say they haven’t heard about climate change,” according to an unpublished study by the Human Science Research Council (HSRC) in 2022.
The low literacy levels are largely blamed on inadequate media coverage of climate change. Recent studies, such as Sithole’s Climate change journalism in South Africa: noticeable improvements, less than adequate, have found that the coverage is frequently dominated by climate disasters, conferences and the releasing of scientific reports, instead of local stories of the day-to-day experiences of communities. While any reporting on climate change should be welcomed, reporting on climate disasters is not very helpful to communities since it is after the fact. Climate conferences tend to discuss top-end climate policy issues that do not attract much attention from ordinary people. Reporting on the release of scientific reports tends to produce news that is usually above the ability of an ordinary person to relate to. Sithole, who holds a PhD degree in climate change communication in South Africa between 1900 and 2021, says that “journalists need to be able to report the climate story from their localities, from where they are, because that is when it makes sense to audiences. If we write about climate change as it happens in far-away places, it’s not going to resonate with local communities. And that is why you will hear people say, ‘oh, stories about climate change don’t sell’. Yes, if you are sitting somewhere in the middle of Africa and are constantly reporting about what happens in North America and Northern Europe, people in Africa will not resonate with that”.
European journalism educators conference ahead in 2025
In Europe, journalism educators have started gearing up for the challenge. EJTA – the European Journalism Training Association – devotes its 2025 Teachers’ Training Conference in Rome to the topic. The conference will explore the best practices to include environmental journalism in the curricula. “Environmental Journalism is a significant, stimulating and valuable subject of study, which lies at the intersection of politics, economics, science, nature and culture, between the individual and collective dimensions, and also between the local, regional and global levels”, states EJTA’s call for proposal, which is open until March 10, 2025.
Complutense University in Madrid is one of the renowned European university-based media institutes that already offer optional modules on climate change reporting. Professor Alejandro Costa Escuredo goes even one step further when he says: “I believe it is essential that environmental journalism should be an independent and mandatory subject. It should not be optional in any case. There are more and more spaces in the media that deal with climate change and, to do so, you must have knowledge of the subject.” Costa argues that “awareness must be a key element”, and warns that “currently, (intentional) misinformation about this matter is significant.” Complutense professors Dimitrina Semova and Alejandro Costa Escuredo have also collaborated in the conceptualisation of creative tools to encourage “Green Citizenship” through digital artistic tools.
Perspectives for journalism education
When it comes to the question whether or not the topic should receive more attention in journalism education, an overwhelming majority of 95% of respondents in our pilot EJO/AJEN analysis said “yes”, and this was the case for both continents.
Thus, in Europe and Africa, journalism educators seem willing to explore the full dimension of the topic. According to Sithole, covering climate change is a cross-cutting topic for the media and, thus, also for journalism educators. Many of them will need training, as well. “The educators also need to educate themselves about climate change, about the policies of climate change, for instance, because climate change is no longer just about the physical science, it’s also about how climate change links to economics, to migration, to crime, and all other areas.” But Dr. Ngozi Omojunikanbi from the University of Port Harcourt, in Nigeria, also warns that efforts on the side of educators might not be enough – at least in many African countries, where environmental issues are highly sensitive. “It requires also the political will of the government to include climate change in the journalism (education) curriculum,” Omojunikanbi says.
Journalism schools are challenged to introduce and teach climate change journalism in their curriculums to empower journalists with the skills required to cover this complex subject systematically and sustainably. Otherwise, climate change will remain unknown to most Africans, yet its impacts afflict pain and suffering daily.
While a more solutions-oriented coverage including resilience strategies might be an option, in European countries, climate change issues are reported by some media with an almost apocalyptic framing. However, the Constructive Institute, which has just started its Constructive Climate Lens project says on its website: “Experts have found out that climate change coverage which induces ‘fear, guilt and shame’ does not work for most people; they escape into denial. Journalism needs to reimagine the climate beat.”
- In total, there were 54 replies, with 28 responses from 15 different African countries, and 25 responses from 16 European countries. As such, both continents were almost equally represented in the survey. The responses were collected in September and October 2024.
- International support for environmental journalism in sub-Sahara Africa is not new. In the early 2000s, the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) initiated and funded the Regional Training Programme in Environment Journalism and Communication in the East African region (Jollov & Lwange-Ntale, 2006). They offered a scholarship to journalists from Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda to study for a post-graduate diploma at Makerere University at the Department of Journalism and Communication. But perhaps as Lidubwi and Wamwea (2023) point out, such programmes were rather broad and did not allow for the beneficiaries to specialise, even though climate change was not the main topic back then.
The Article Climate change: Deserted land in journalism/African Journalism Education https://ajenafrica.com/climate-change-deserted-land-in-journalism-education/ was first published in Aejenda Newsletter on 13 January 2025.