The Wire will be partnering with the ‘Covering Climate Now’ project to commit to special coverage of the climate crisis. We will publish a series of reports leading up to the United Nations’ climate action summit in New York in September, where the world’s governments will submit their plans to keep global temperature rise to ‘well below 2º C’ as agreed in the Paris Agreement.
The project was cofounded by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and The Nation. It aims to strengthen the focus of the media on the climate crisis. Over 170 news outlets, wire services, newspapers, magazines and radio and television channels have announced their commitment to dedicated climate coverage. They include The Guardian, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone magazine, Vanity Fair, Slate, The Conversation and Nature. The organisations participating from India are The Wire, the People’s Archive of Rural India, the Hindustan Times, the Times of India and News18.
Greta Thunberg with her placard in Stockholm
CJR and The Nation launched ‘Covering Climate Now’ in May this year at an event at the Columbia Journalism School, New York, with the objective of facilitating a collaboration between media outlets across the world to increase and improve their coverage of the world’s climate emergency.
Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had warned of dire consequences if governments didn’t immediately act to curb greenhouse gas emissions and limit the extent of global heating. Its report had said that the impact of changes in the climate were likely to grow exponentially if Earth’s surface becomes 2º C warmer on average than it was in the pre-industrial era. The panel also warned that we’d cross a ‘point of no return’ around 2030 after which there will only be so much we can do to reverse the damage we’re causing now.
The sense of urgency underpinning ‘Covering Climate Now’ reflects several social movements that have sprung up around the world, each demanding governments and businesses act to protect the environment, reduce resource consumption and improve climate justice.
Perhaps the most notable among them is led by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish high-school student. After her solo protest demanding climate action outside the Swedish parliament last year, school students around the world began the ‘Fridays for Future’ global strike. In March this year, its participation peaked at 2 million in 135 countries, including India. The students’ principal demands were that governments reduce their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions and eliminate air pollution.
India has already been experiencing erratic rainfall, floods and droughts in quick succession, and stronger, more protracted heat waves. All of these have affected the health and livelihoods of 600 million people deemed particularly vulnerable, including daily-wage labourers and those without access to clean water and medical care. Rising seas have been eating away at the country’s 75,000-km-long coastline; according to one report, India lost 33% of its coastline to erosion between 1990 and 2006.
As a result of these changes, the UN has estimated that India lost almost $80 billion between 1998 and 2017. Another analysis concluded India’s economy is 31% smaller than it would have been in the absence of climate change.
Even though India’s per capita as well as historical emissions are lower than that of most countries, the country has a lot to lose due to its tropical and subtropical climate, relatively lower standards of living, high population density and reliance on the monsoons. India is ranked 14th on the global climate risk index published by Germanwatch.