In Focus

Supported by Google News Initiative

Europe’s Climate Reporting Landscape 2023

Earlier this year, journalists, editors and innovators from more than 20 European newsrooms gathered in Bonn, Germany. They were not there to visit the Beethoven Monument or the Haribo Factory, but to uncover new opportunities and creative ideas around the most important story of our time.


From Portugal to Paris and Brussels to Berlin, this diverse group of journalists had come to Bonn to take part in Fathm’s inaugural European Climate Reporting Bootcamp.

Europe is the fastest warming continent in the world. The State of the Climate in Europe 2022 report, produced by the World Meteorological Organization and the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service, showed Europe has been warming twice as much as the global average since the 1980s. Last year, Europe was approximately 2.3°C above the ‘pre-industrial’ average used as a baseline for the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Changes in climate temperature can have profound effects on health, agriculture, energy demand, and the growth cycles of other organisms. In Europe, 2022 was one of the warmest years on record and the United Kingdom hit 40°C for the first time. Meanwhile, severe droughts continued to impact the Iberian Peninsula and mountain regions of the Alps and Pyrenees, while devastating wildfires blazed in France, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia and Czechia.

It’s a trend that looks set to continue. In July 2023, the European Space Agency announced that temperatures in southern Italy were expected to reach 48°C, which would make them the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe. 

The ESA’s Sentinel-1 mission, developed for the Copernicus initiative, monitors climate change data which is available for journalists to explore via the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem. 

Speaking at Fathm's Climate Bootcamp, Thomas Ormston, Sentinel-1 deputy spacecraft operations manager, drew a surprising parallel between tackling space junk and climate change.

“These are global problems that have been accelerating exponentially in the last few years, caused historically by Western industrialised countries with minimal regulation,” he said. “Yet we continue to pollute an environment that's almost at breaking point.”

At Fathm, we believe the role of journalism to inform society about the climate crisis is more crucial than ever. There is a fresh urgency to getting climate journalism right, and with that comes unique challenges as well as opportunities for new ways of storytelling and formats.

Our European Climate Reporting Bootcamp, made possible by Google News Initiative’s Collaborating for Climate Coverage programme, is the basis for this report offering an overview of what climate reporting looks like in 2023.

Creating space for climate coverage

Globally, media coverage of climate-related stories is growing. Across a study of 59 countries, a recent IPCC report noted an increase from 47,000 articles in 2016-17 to 87,000 in 2020-21.

Much of the research around climate journalism tends to focus on the US, which has a larger market for such stories thanks to its sizable English-speaking audience. Here, as in other countries, growing pressure on the traditional business models of legacy media have led to a decline in science and environmental reporting.

However, this decline is less pronounced in countries with strong public service broadcasting – many of which are European countries. This year, Norway’s public broadcaster NRK bulked out its well-established climate desk with technology specialists in AI and social media. With more than 20 reporters split across Oslo and Bergen, the new climate and technology team produces current climate news, in-depth features and investigative stories. 

Deutsche Welle, part of the public broadcaster in Germany, recently launched its DW Planet A YouTube channel, which publishes climate explainer videos and solutions-based stories designed to appeal to younger audiences. A recent TikTok video about proposed oil drilling in Alaska reached 7 million views and over 550,000 interactions.

Meanwhile, French news agency AFP merged its business and environment desks last year to create a brand new Planet hub with more than 20 specialist climate journalists, plus fact-checkers and photo editors. 

Yet for every success story, there are many other newsrooms – especially smaller, independent and nonprofit newsrooms – who are struggling to do climate reporting as well as they might like due to lack of resources, expertise and other challenges we’ll discuss in the next chapter. 

At Fathm, we believe the way journalism covers climate needs a rethink. And if newsrooms want to engage audiences and go beyond preaching to the choir, we need to create space to innovate from the ground up. 

A climate design sprint

The European Climate Reporting Bootcamp centered around Fathm’s unique Journalism Design Sprint, with the goal of facilitating new approaches and collaborative solutions around the way climate is covered in newsrooms across Europe. 

We assembled a wide range of participants from public broadcasters such as Deutsche Welle and ORF, large newsrooms such as The Times, Der Standard, Público, and global players such as AFP, POLITICO Europe and Thomson Reuters Foundation. Participants were also welcomed came from smaller newsrooms (Mensagem, Unbias the News, Lighthouse Reports), nonprofit newsrooms (CORRECTIV, Faktograf, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism) and niche, digital-native news sites (Clean Energy Wire, Investigative Reporting Project Italy).

In line with Fathm’s environmental policy, participants received a stipend to encourage sustainable travel by train or car share, and we off-set the estimated carbon footprint of the whole event via Ecologi. The delicious catering was plant-based and provided by local suppliers. 

Together, the participants assessed the challenges facing European climate journalists today. Then they mapped out audience and stakeholder needs – identifying who and what is served by climate reporting, and how. Finally, participants worked in groups to create testable concepts they believed would demonstrate a fresh and more engaging approach to climate journalism.

As the very name suggests, in a design sprint the clock (or rather, the Time Timer) is always ticking. The traditional five-day design sprint was built that way to ensure fewer distractions and zero procrastination. A two-day design sprint requires even more laser-sharp focus. 

As such, this report is a no-frills digest of the key discussions, ideas and solutions from our Climate Bootcamp. You can read the whole thing in under an hour, or simply cherry-pick the chapters you’re interested in most. Whichever way you read it, we hope that it will inspire, inform, and help to make climate reporting better for everyone.

The challenges of climate reporting in European newsrooms

The first part of any design sprint is to map out the challenges you face in trying to reach your goal: in this case, doing climate journalism better in European newsrooms. Using whiteboard markers and dozens of magnetic Post-it notes, our Climate Bootcamp participants mapped out the key challenges facing climate journalists in Europe today.

In many ways, climate reporting faces the same challenges that all journalism does: lack of funding and resources, news avoidance from audiences and, increasingly, distrust in mainstream news organisations. However, there are also distinct and significant challenges that are unique to climate journalism. 

Siloed climate desks

Lots of participants noted that, especially in legacy organisations, newsroom infrastructure has often not kept pace with the ways climate news is reported and consumed. Climate desks are often siloed from other teams within the newsroom, making communication and collaboration more challenging. Daniela Späth, DW lab coordinator at Deutsche Welle, noted that many newsrooms lacked a “culture of cooperation” between different disciplines. 

“Often, the infrastructure of newsrooms still consists of many areas of expertise that are working very separately from one another,” Späth explained. “However, climate change is a complex topic, including many different areas. For climate stories, collaboration is key.” 

Top-down resistance 

Resistance to climate reporting can also come from within the news organisation itself. In April 2023, Axel-Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner made headlines for all the wrong reasons when leaked messages appeared to suggest he’d put pressure on editorial teams to attack climate change activism. 

At our Climate Bootcamp, some participants also mentioned that they felt there was a lack of support for climate reporting at an executive level. “Often journalists who are covering the climate crisis have to "fight" with the editors to do stories that might make the front page,” said Melita Vrsaljko, a multimedia journalist at the Croatian outlet Faktograf.

The perception of climate reporting within the newsroom was often a challenge, with one person noting that editors were “not willing to cover the root of the issue, only the symptoms”.

Relevancy

Part of the problem for both editors and journalists, of course, is making climate fit the daily news agenda. The climate crisis is the ultimate slow-burn story. With the exception of large-scale climate-induced natural disasters and international conferences such as the United Nations’ COP, it rarely necessitates the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour updates that feed the 24-hour news cycle. 

Making climate reporting relevant and “newsy” were two of the biggest challenges mentioned by our Bootcamp participants, especially as climate was all too often seen as a separate beat, rather than as a dimension of day-to-day stories.

Selective news avoidance

Participants were also aware that audiences felt “tired, helpless and overwhelmed” when it came to the issue of climate change, making it more challenging for journalists to reach and engage them on the topic.

“Climate change is so overwhelming,” said Adam Levy, a Berlin-based science journalist and climate change communicator. “People are scared to hear about it and scared to talk about it, because they don’t want to say the wrong thing.” 

The term ‘selective news avoidance’, first used by the Reuters Institute, describes behaviour in which people “increasingly choose to ration or limit their exposure to [news] – or at least to certain types of news.” 

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023 highlighted climate change as an example of selective news avoidance. More than 30 per cent of those surveyed admitted that they avoided specific news that increased anxiety or lowered their mood, even if they were otherwise very interested in the topic. “Certain news stories that are repeated excessively or are felt to be ‘emotionally draining’ are often passed over in favour of something more uplifting,” the report noted.

At Deutsche Welle, Kiyo Dörrer, supervising editor of Planet A, cited news avoidance and fatigue around climate topics as one of her team’s biggest challenges, particularly in reaching younger audiences. “Young people are getting their news less from traditional outlets or are actively avoiding news, especially bad news,” she said. “So how do we reach them? How do we make them care?”

Climate denial

Our participants were no strangers to climate deniers posting false or misleading claims in response to their reporting. Many of them had noticed a marked increase in climate change denialism on Twitter, which critics say has been failing to properly moderate harmful content since Elon Musk’s takeover. 

“It's very normal now for even the most bog-standard sharing of scientific information to receive hundreds of replies in a short amount of time all sharing exactly the same misinformation,” said Levy.

Climate literacy

Climate literacy within the newsroom, or lack thereof, was another key challenge raised by our participants. After all, if journalists outside the climate beat have little or no basic knowledge of climate change science, how can they support and assist their colleagues that do?

Of course, climate literacy is an issue for audiences, too. A University of Cambridge survey of more than 1,700 adults in the UK found almost half were unable to identify 50% of fake climate change news headlines. Some 46% wrongly believed that “Scientists disagree on the cause of climate change” while 35% failed to spot the falsity of “Scientists believe the Sun has impacted the Earth’s rise in temperature”. 

Resources

In many newsrooms, climate reporters were either working as a team-of-one or within a small team that still didn’t feel well-enough equipped to cover the growing list of industries impacted by climate, such as agriculture, retail, the energy sector, and more. 

Climate reporting is often over-stretched, meaning that without collaboration and support from colleagues in the newsroom, potential stories may be under-reported – or unreported altogether. 

Stakeholders in European climate reporting

When undertaking any sort of climate reporting project, it is important to consider for whom you are doing it. The term “stakeholders” might traditionally belong in a boardroom, but in Fathm’s climate bootcamp design sprint we used it to define “anybody who can affect, or is affected by, climate reporting”.

We asked our participants the following questions:

  1. Who are the internal stakeholders in your organisation? 

  2. Who are the external stakeholders? 

  3. What are the needs of these stakeholders? 

Here’s a summary of what they came up with:

Affected communities

Affected communities might include distinct social and cultural groups such as younger people, indigenous peoples, or lower-income communities. Participants noted that impacted communities could also be sources, such as those mentioned above, as well as future generations and the planet itself.

Communicators 

Within a newsroom, stakeholder communicators might include your fellow climate reporters, your line manager, and your wider network of colleagues at all levels within the business. Each of these will, of course, have their own stakeholders. For example, participants noted how their colleagues on the political desk may come under increased pressure from policy makers. 

Outside the newsroom, commutators might include sources such as climate scientists and other experts, as well as on-the-ground sources. Then there are fringe communicators such as influencers and activists, both youth activists and veterans.

Funders

Commercial news media in Europe is largely funded by commercial and philanthropic donors, advertising, and Big Tech (for example, Google’s Digital News Initiative). However, funder stakeholders were a potential source of friction for many newsrooms. As Ivan Couronne, deputy head of AFP’s Planet Hub, noted: "We could arguably sell ads to the green steel industry, but that's a slippery slope if we were to later report on them.”

Politicians and policy makers

Political stakeholders might include politicians, political parties and governments, whose roles as stakeholders will vary according to their political and economic affiliations. In this category, participants also included the UN and any non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who hold significant sway over policy decisions. 

Fossil fuel companies 

Fossil fuel firms might not be an obvious stakeholder in climate reporting, but they are nevertheless affected by it, and can have an effect on it. A 2023 report by Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) found that entities linked to the fossil fuel sector spent around $4 million on paid Meta ads spreading false climate claims before and during COP27. 

European interest in climate change news

Attitudes and interest in climate change journalism vary widely around the world, driven by a diverse range of social, economic and political factors. At a global level, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2022 noted that people who are more interested in climate change news tend to have higher levels of income and education. They also tend to be older – which may come as a surprise given the vociferousness of young climate activists on TikTok, although it appears the Greta Thunberg effect applies to all ages.  

In Europe, the Reuters Institute report showed that interest in climate change news is significantly higher in the southern part of the continent than in the north, east or west. Just over half of respondents in Greece (53%), Portugal (53%), and Turkey (52%) said they were interested in news about climate change and the environment. By contrast, interest is lowest in Poland (36%), Czech Republic (36%), France (36%) and Norway (33%).

One reason for these regional and country-level differences might be political polarisation, suggested Dr Craig T. Robertson, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “In markets with greater differences in interest between those on the political left versus right, there is less overall interest in climate change news,” he noted. “On the other hand, in markets with the highest levels of interest, there is less left–right polarisation.” 

Interest in climate change news is also lower across Europe generally than it is in the Global South, where countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America are more likely to experience the adverse consequences of climate change. Yet according to a 2021 study, the Global South has relatively few specialist climate journalists in mainstream media organisations. 

This lack of journalistic resources – an issue for many newsrooms, but especially those in the Global South – means climate journalism is currently dominated by the Global North, and particularly the Anglosphere. It is produced by overwhelmingly white and middle-class journalists in regions that tend to be the least affected by climate change. 

This, of course, has an impact on what stories are reported, and how. In 2021, researchers in Zurich and Switzerland analysed climate change coverage across 10 countries and found that the Global North focused on climate science and related topics (causes, solutions and impact on ecosystems). By contrast, coverage in the South focused more on societal and developmental dimensions, i.e. the impact of climate change on humans. 

One might argue that the Eurocentric approach to climate journalism pays less attention to the human impact of climate change because privilege awards a false sense that the climate crisis is further away – figuratively as well as geographically – than it actually is. 

Image credit: Climate change in news media across the globe: An automated analysis of issue attention and themes in climate change coverage in 10 countries by Valerie Hase, Daniela Mahl, Mike S. Schäfer and Tobias R. Keller

Best practices in European climate reporting

Solutions-based climate reporting

So, how can the media report on the climate crisis without triggering news avoidance, resistance and feelings of helplessness? In Germany, a team of psychologists published a science-based climate reporting guide to answer just this question. 

The psychologists’ recommendation for overcoming climate fatigue is to translate these emotional responses into constructive action addressing climate change. They state the advantages of “highlighting successful solutions and coping strategies” such as pointing out positive climate action and activities, illustrating collaborative climate action (which is more beneficial than individual action), and offering information on how and where individuals can take action, if they choose.

This solutions-based interpretation of climate reporting, they believe, “strengthens courage and confidence, promotes the ability to act, self-efficacy, and the experience of control and cohesion”. However, solutions journalism can be a double-edged sword for some journalists, who risk accusations of activism. 

Meet your audience ‘where they are’

Deutsche Welle’s Planet A publishes solutions-based climate coverage on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram; spaces where they know younger audiences already hang out. But more than simply existing in those spaces, Planet A makes it a priority to speak the language of each individual platform; to get to know the audience there and how they communicate.

“Every platform needs its own strategy and expertise,” explained Kiyo Dörrer. “If our reporters work for TikTok, they need to know the latest TikTok trend. If they are on YouTube, they need to know how the narrative style there is evolving on the platform.”

For example, a video on bilge dumping – whereby vessels pollute oceans with oily wastewater – runs to almost 12 minutes long on YouTube, but works because, as Dörrer noted, the audience enjoys content that is not afraid to “go niche, be nerdy and dive deep”.

The French charter

Setting a cross-industry standard for climate reporting can help to strengthen journalistic practices and encourage collaboration. In France, for example, more than 1,200 journalists and dozens of newsrooms have signed a charter to “step up” their approach in addressing the climate emergency. 

The charter, launched in 2022 by the independent environmental news site Vert and supported by climate experts and scientists, encourages journalists and newsrooms to cover climate stories in an “interdisciplinary manner”, to guarantee transparency and to be mindful of the wording and images used. 

A similar charter by the German Climate Journalism Network and its partner networks in Austria and Switzerland has almost 300 signatories.  

Regularly scheduled climate reporting 

Making climate reporting part of the regular news agenda sounds like a no-brainer, but not all newsrooms follow this structure. Understanding that climate can be applied to many different stories, rather than seeing it as a niche beat, means additional resources and funding are not necessarily required to give climate a regular spot on the schedule and remind the wider editorial team of its importance.

“There needs to be a regular vehicle to enable ongoing, creative and thoughtful climate reporting,” explained Gerhard Maier, a climate journalist and presenter at the Austrian public broadcaster ORF. Since April 2022 he has hosted and edited ZIB Magazin Klima – Austrian broadcast's first climate weekly.

“The continuity of this slot and its team serves as an aid to basic knowledge for all,” he added, “and also as a field of experimentation for creative climate reporting that is as broad as possible.”

Q&A: What apps, tools or social communities would you recommend to other climate journalists in Europe?

NASA Global Climate Change for graphics and multimedia. Climate Watch for data, visualisations and analysis. I’m also a big fan of Carbon Brief. 

– Melita Vrsaljko, Faktograf

The international network of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network is extremely helpful. I also recommend the Climate Solutions Reporting Guide by Climate Covering Now to understand the range of possibilities for climate reporting. 

– Gerhard Maier, ORF

The European Journalism Centre’s News Impact Summit workshops. 

– Kiyo Dörrer, DW Planet A

8 story ideas
on positive climate action 

Reporting on positive climate action is one way to help overcome audience fatigue and news avoidance  when it comes to the climate crisis. Inspired by the European Climate Foundation, here are eight ideas for stories about positive climate action that can be covered at both a local or national level.

Environmental

  • Protection of ecosystems and biodiversity, preservation of forests

  • Reduced air pollution, improved water and soil quality

Economic

  • Highly efficient industries and infrastructure

  • Renewable energy/reduced dependency on energy imports

Societal

  • Social justice and civic engagement

  • Better public transport and services

Public Health

  • More efficient public health services

  • More available food and improved diets

Measuring impact

Climate journalists, like many journalists, are often drawn to the work they do because they want to make a difference in the world – but it can be hard to measure and understand the difference that this work actually makes. 

Quantitative metrics such as pageviews, clicks and shares only go so far, and tell us nothing about whether stories have helped to inform people, or moved them to action, or even changed their behaviour. Measuring impact is one way to do this. 

At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent media organisation in the UK, each editorial team has a dedicated impact producer whose job it is to assess the impact of reporting at structural, community, and individual levels.

Grace Murray is an impact producer within the Bureau’s environment team. “Numbers are attractive – clicks, page views, or whatever – but they don’t tell you how people are engaging with your work and how meaningful it was to them,” she explained. 

As a nonprofit, the Bureau relies on donations from foundations, organisations and individuals to be able to continue its award-winning investigative reporting. 

Creating a climate impact strategy

Figuring out how to measure impact – and what to measure – may not be as simple as it sounds.“You need to decide what your organisation deems as impact,” said Murray, noting that this will vary from organisation to organisation. 

TBIJ’s impact metrics are “a broad church,” said Murray. “We measure high level policy changes and decisions, sanctions and resignations, but we measure it right across to helping community organisers or giving people resources and knowledge that they wouldn’t have otherwise had.”

Measuring impact also needs to be consistent across the organisation, she said, adding that this is something that is often not thought about too deeply.  

Tools for measuring impact

There are plenty of tools around to help news orgs measure impact, but not all offer an intuitive user experience – something which can hamper an organisations ability to measure efficiently and accurately.

And, as with anything new that is introduced into a busy newsroom, measuring impact is not without its challenges. “One big challenge is getting people in the newsroom to input [data],” said Murray. “In some organisations, journalists publish it in their CMS as an addendum.”

Impact producers at TBIJ doesn’t use “one single shiny tool,” said Murray, and in some ways are still figuring out the best tool for their needs. TBIJ use “straightforward spreadsheets” to see where stories get picked up by other publishers, for example, or whether politicians have been briefed on them. 

She also recommends The Center of Investigative Reporting’s Impact Tracker and Impact Architects’ Impact Tracker – a free and simple Google-based platform which displays visual and interactive data sets.  

Testable Concepts

At the end of Fathm’s Climate Reporting Bootcamp, participants worked in groups to come up with testable concepts for fresh and innovative approaches to climate reporting. Here are the six projects they came up with:

Your AI Life in Climate

Audiences can enter basic details about themselves to generate a version of how their life may play out according to IPCC climate change data. Through visual imagery and storytelling, this application will illustrate how increasing temperatures may affect people’s lives depending on their location and the actions they take next. The aim is to help audiences understand the IPCC report and connect it with their day-to-day lives, as well as presenting them with samples of other people’s lives around the world who are also using the same application.

What’s Stopping Us

This YouTube and podcast-ready series counters climate obstacles with climate solutions by posing an obvious yet under-answered question. In the pilot episode “What's stopping us from eating less meat?” audiences will learn that plant-based diets can solve the high carbon emissions from the meat industry if widely adopted. However, powerful agricultural lobbies seek to maintain the status quo. The series aims to empower viewers by offering alternative solutions in an accessible and shareable format that fosters awareness and motivates action rather than helplessness.

Angle AI

An AI-powered tool that helps journalists uncover climate angles that may be overlooked in their reporting. By analysing keywords in stories, it suggests new or additional climate-related perspectives. For example, a recent story on Rishi Sunak using a helicopter for a trip that would have taken just over an hour by train failed to mention that train travel would also be better for the environment. Similarly, stories on topics like fast fashion or sports events disrupted by extreme weather can be enhanced with climate-related insights. The goal is to enhance climate coverage in mainstream news by ensuring relevance and visibility.

Meet Me Here

A video format which brings together people from different generations, who have opposing opinions on topics relating to climate change, to discuss their opinions in a setting which replaces conflict with structured dialogue. A social-first pilot would allow the concept to be tested before approaching linear broadcasters. This video concept is specifically aimed at improving climate literacy among the over 60s, allowing them to understand the climate impact of their voting preferences.

Erasmus Newsroom Exchange

The Erasmus newsroom exchange programme is a flexible and scalable programme that would see journalists, editors, social media teams, and support staff exchange their jobs with a climate-focused colleague for an opportunity to learn how they can bring a climate lens to their own roles. These exchanges could happen within an organisation, or become a collaborative effort between organisations. The programme aims to spread climate literacy across departments and increase the number of climate-related stories across all desks and products.

Pollution Map

Pollution Map is a visual storytelling tool that aims to show the local connection between air quality, health, and the environment to its audience. It maps data points such as air quality, water quality, and industry locations to engage audiences based on self-interest and elements of curiosity and surprise, as well as encouraging community and newsroom skills with data sets. The goal is to enhance public awareness of the impact of pollution on health and the environment while promoting the importance of data-driven journalism.

Appendix

Fathm would like to thank Google News Initiative for supporting this project, as well as the following speakers and participants involved in the European Climate Reporting Bootcamp:

  • Thomas Ormston, The European Space Agency 

  • AFP (France) 

  • Deutsche Welle (Germany) 

  • ORF (Austria) 

  • CORRECTIV (Germany) 

  • Der Standard (Austria) 

  • POLITICO Europe (Belgium) 

  • Público (Portugal) 

  • The Times (UK) 

  • Thomson Reuters Foundation (UK) 

  • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (UK) 

  • Mensagem de Lisboa (Portugal)

  • The Conversation UK (UK)

  • Clean Energy Wire (Germany)

  • Earthrise Studio (UK)

  • Faktograf.hr (Croatia)

  • InSight Crime (Netherlands)

  • Investigative Reporting Project (Italy)

  • Lighthouse Reports (Italy)

  • The Ferret (UK)

  • Unbias the News (Germany)

  • World Economic Forum (Switzerland)

  • Adam Levy (Germany)

  • Madalina Vlasceanu, New York University (USA)

To learn more about Fathm’s work in climate consulting visit fathm.co/climate or contact abigail@fathm.co.