Science & Journalism for Climate Action

Awareness about climate change is not prevalent in mainstream discourse in many Central and Eastern European Countries, thus impeding public support for climate change prevention and mitigation. Media does have the power to increase awareness. Yet climate change coverage is often weak, opinionated, and lacks solid scientific argumentation. Scientist, on the other hand, who have the necessary understanding of climate change’s causes and effects, often lack expertise in climate science communication, not being able to communicate their knowledge in an accessible manner.

The project team aimed to strengthen the connections between journalists and scientists in order to increase communication capacities of each group and thus improve the quality of climate change coverage and climate science communication. First, project members identified capacity gaps in both groups. As a next step, members took part in a series of events: in training groups, they improved their knowledge, skills, and expertise regarding effective climate communication. As part of these trainings, participants produced high-quality content such as popular science articles and science talks. National and regional media provided the distributional channels for these products. Furthermore, networking events established connections between journalists and scientists that lasted beyond the project’s time frame, thus providing the basis for future high-quality climate change coverage and climate science communication.

• Networking between journalists and scientists: Stakeholders from science and journalism have connected through the establishment of four national online working hubs, which enabled 152 participants to collaborate. In the long term, this promotes the dissemination and communication of climate content to the public.  
• Strengthening communication skills: Over 200 participants (scientists and journalists) from four countries have improved their capacity to communicate climate change issues to non-expert audiences through 16 workshops. In the workshops, participants were able to learn from experts in the fields of journalism and climate science, carry out practical tandem exercises (journalists and scientists working together), and receive feedback from mentors and professional peers. This helps ensure that content is communicated more effectively and that various target audiences can be reached, improving the visibility and knowledge about climate protection. 
• Dissemination of climate protection: The project helped scientists and journalists in four countries collaborate to produce 370 content pieces on climate change across more than 90 media channels (TV, radio, print, web media). This resulted in lasting partnerships between scientists and journalists. More than 40 journalist-scientist pairs continue co-authoring stories on climate. Their collaboration has improved the quality and depth of reporting on the topic in Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Hungary and brought a wide array of interesting climate topics to the knowledge of general audiences.