Participant Stories: Climate Change

  • Several journalists from Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Pakistan and Bangledesh attended an ICFJ five day training session in Sri Lanka

  • Children are some of the victims of rising sea levels, many displaced into larger cities where the poverty rate is high

  • Journalists from countries in South Asia learn about multimedia reporting in Sri Lanka, April 2012

  • Journalists from South Asia wrote about environmental topics such as rising sea levels

Change is coming to the coastlines of East Asia. Rising sea levels over the next few decades will engulf populous coastlines, erase islands and displace millions of people.

Many journalists in this regional training program chose story projects focused on how global climate change has already wreaked havoc. Rising sea levels and disrupted rain patterns have flooded coastal homesteads and forced migration. Attacking the story from different angles in different countries, the journalists used photos, videos and text to document the painful costs of climate change.

Bangladesh reporters showed how floods have crumbled the coastline, swallowing houses and villages. In Pakistan and Bhutan journalists published stories about how glacial melt in the Himalayas set off flooding and disrupted rain patterns, threatening food production.

As South Asians struggle to adapt, reporters revealed that climate change here is anything but theoretical.

The journalists took part in the New Media, New Challenges: Best Practices workshop over a five day period in April 2012, and learned about multimedia news reporting and new technologies to advance journalism in their countries.

These are stories with an impact that ran online, on television and in print. These are stories that displayed quality reporting and excellent research about the ways that the world and nature can shape the lives of thousands in just one area on the planet.