How to make climate stories impossible to ignore | Katherine Dunn

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Headlines about climate change sometimes scare the crap out of me. And honestly, I don't always want to open them. I know I'm not alone. So how do we get people to open these stories and learn about the crisis that has an impact on all of us? For journalist and climate communicator Catherine Dunn, this is one of the most important questions she faces in her work. In her 2024 talk, she shares the tools journalists are using to connect with audiences and make it harder for people to turn away.

0:45It's all about finding what affects people's lives locally. Or as Catherine puts it, the answer to the question, what's your mango? Trust me, it's a brilliant question, but you'll have to listen to find out what it means.

1:01So I have a confession to make. And it's that for many of you, you'll know when the IPCC reports come out every year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change telling us where we are with climate change and where we're going. And there's this flood of headlines, right? You've probably all seen them. Often, I don't click on those stories. I don't read them. And I'm a journalist, so this is an embarrassing thing to admit. And it's not because I don't think this work is amazing or I don't think the IPCC is amazing. I really, really do. But I also know why I'm not clicking on those stories, right?

1:37And I think it's probably for reasons a lot of people don't click on them. They scare the crap out of me. Sometimes when you work on this stuff all the time, you think, well, we're screwed. Like, tell me something else I don't know, right? Or it can be technical. It can be overwhelming. People feel like they have so much on their plate. Why are they going to look at these stories? So that's a challenge. It's a challenge for journalists, but it's also a challenge for all of us. because I think the more that we know about climate change, the more that we read climate change or consume climate change news, the more that we know about climate change.

2:11So I work at the Reuters Institute, and our researchers saw in eight countries when people consume climate news weekly instead of monthly, you know, they know things like, climate change is affecting my health right now instead of in the future. Or, you know, rich, more polluting countries bear more responsibility for climate change than the poor ones who did less to cause it. But we know that the more they consume climate change news, the more that they actually know. So I'm from Calgary, Alberta. It's an oil and gas city. I'm from an oil and gas family. And I got into covering climate change because I covered the energy industry.

2:46I covered the big oil and gas companies. And when I was covering climate change, I could see that I was having the same problem, right? I could see that people weren't clicking or reading my stories. Sometimes as a journalist, you see behind the veil of what people are clicking on. It's a very traumatic experience. So I left my job. It was so traumatic, I left my job. And in 2022, I joined a new project called the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, which is at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. And it was set up by our co-founders with this idea that climate is really, you know, it's a lens.

3:23It's not an angle. It's not a beat. It's something that goes across everything. And that's how we as journalists should cover it. So every six months, we get 100 journalists in kind of a virtual room. They come from 50 to 60 countries, and they come from all different positions in the newsroom. You know, they're editor-in-chiefs and people in economics, finance, sports, culture, as well as loads of climate experts. And we get them in a room, and over the course of six months, you know, we look at climate from loads of different angles. We look at it from the science, the finance, but also we look at culture, we look at sports.

3:59you know and this kind of helps people on all these different desks question their assumptions so that's kind of a brilliant approach so okay first of all it's not just me who does this work right there's a team of us there's my boss Mitali Mukherjee there's my colleague Diego Geras-Ortiz and Greg Cochran and now three years in we're at 600 journalists and we kind of often say like when we started out we were pretty honest that we just had questions about this kind of stuff, right? We didn't really have that many answers. And now three years in, we're going into our fourth year. We have a few places that we like to start.

4:34And many of you aren't journalists, but you can probably use this in your own lives, in your own industries. So one place we start is called Find Your Mango. So this comes from an Egyptian editor called Susie. And we had a discussion about, you know, why weren't the mangoes as good in Egypt this year? Why weren't they as tasty. It was climate change, of course. And then we went around the room and we looked at like, what's the mango in your country? So Diego's Costa Rican, it's coffee for him, where I'm from, and you know, it's skiing. You know, it's durian, it's mushroom picking, it's football in a lot of the world, and a lot of the world it's mangoes as well.

5:12But it's all these things that kind of connect us to climate. And we often talk about lives and livelihoods. These things are so important. but it's also sports, food, culture, like the things that really make our lives worth living and the things that are really important to us. The second thing is that climate coverage is contagious. And once you start looking for climate coverage in your newsroom, you can find it all kinds of different places. So sometimes people come to Diego and I and they say, we're gonna start a climate desk or should we hire reporters or what should we do? And we say, okay, a lot of what other newsrooms have done a lot of the time is they've taken an inventory.

5:47and they look at what they're already doing. And often there's way more than you would expect. So local reporters, you know, they're covering water issues. They're covering city hall questions. You know, business reporters are covering energy prices. They're covering insurance. Sports reporters are covering like when it is too hot to have, you know, a kid's little league game, this kind of thing. And actually journalists are doing this. So one great example is AFP, where they have a style guide that connects, you know, extreme weather events with when they can connect it to climate change, what's the link that they can make, which is something a lot of journalists are grappling with.

6:25And Ivan Karan, who is in charge of the climate strategy at AFP and is one of our members, he's also in charge of kind of bringing climate training to everybody in AFP. And this is something a lot of newsrooms are doing. And what they've realized, it's not always about the big climate story, right? It's often about taking these stories, adding a little bit of context, a line, a paragraph. It's all about connecting the dots, giving the readers and the audience that context. So the third thing we suggest is be proactive. A lot of climate coverage, it used to be the science reporters were sitting over here.

7:02They knew what was going on. They had this very difficult job. And then every time there was a climate disaster, it was over here. Bang, bang, bang, bang, react, react, react, right? And we weren't often making this connection. But the world has changed, and we know this stuff is coming. So I'm Canadian, we know the wildfires are coming, right? From most of the world, we know the extreme heat is coming every single year. And if we know stuff is coming, like, we have no excuse not to kind of prepare, and not just in the really long term, but like, you know, for next month or next summer. And this is also something newsrooms are doing.

7:34And we often compare it to like the Olympics or the election. So in the Indian elections earlier this year, you know, extreme heat was a huge, huge, huge factor for the people in the polling booths, but also for the journalists who are covering it, who are often getting heat stroke. But it was also an issue in Paris this summer. What does it mean if it's 40 degrees in Paris, which is, you know, super likely? What does it mean for the athletes? What does it mean for the crowds? So when I say this, I often like to mention a couple stories that I really love. One of them is a story called The Great Electrician Shortage by David Owen at The New Yorker.

8:10And it's a story about how, you know, in the energy transition, we need to electrify everything, right? So we need loads of electricians. And it's a story about the energy transition and climate change, but it's also a story about job choices and the labor market and what people should do with their lives and what you should study at university. And another thing I like to mention is a little series called Climate Heroes, which is at the Irish public broadcaster RTE under a lovely guy called Philip Bromwell, who's also an alumni of ours. And they're these little social first videos, you know, very, very short.

8:47And they're about people doing stuff in their communities. So they're about a climate comedian going on the road. They're about a professional rugby player turned climate activist. There's loads of biodiversity stories. There's loads of stories about local businesses changing how they deal with waste. And they're like very easy to binge and they make you feel good. And the question there is not really about should we not do the big hard-hitting stuff? Should we not cover the IPCC? It's like, this is so big now, we should do both, right? And a lot of these stories, as simple as they seem, they go back to something that I was taught when I started journalism school, which is that, you know, one of my first professors would have us write on the top of the paper, he'd say a story is someone doing something because someone needs to be doing something.

9:33There needs to be agency. Something needs to be happening. So when I say all of this, it sounds like super simple and like, oh, it's so easy. And obviously in a lot of this work, it can feel like the boundary for success is so high, you know, it's stopping climate change, right? So anything short of that can feel like a failure. And I think that's something that climate journalists are grappling with every day, like what that feels like. But just because the boundary is so high, for journalists, when we're looking at what's our role here, and it's providing good, useful information, can help people make really, really tangible, really important choices about their lives.

10:14Is it safe to go to the park today with their kids? Is it too hot? What should they do with their careers? What does the future kind of hold? These are really tangible decisions. So I think when we look at those, you know, these are places that we can start. We can start by remembering what's really important to the audience. We can be proactive and we can make connections. And these are things that I hope will kind of help connect with audiences and make it a little bit harder for people to look away. So thanks so much. Thank you.

10:50That was Catherine Dunn at TED Countdown's Dilemma event in Brussels in 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.