Climate Change Media Partnership Fellows from India, Brazil and the Philippines interview a Danish wind energy executive (credit: James Fahn)
How do journalists who cover the environment cope with the relentless flow of depressing information? Should they strive for neutrality or become advocates for action on issues such as climate change and the biodiversity crisis? And how can these journalists stay safe when powerful forces want to silence them, and too often succeed? Continue reading
Once upon a time, not so long ago, we were all mobile. Movement was what enabled our ancestors to track resources that were here today, gone tomorrow. In parts of the world where water, pasture or good hunting are not constantly available, mobility is still the key that unlocks scattered resources. It is the key to resilience. And as the climate changes, this ancient strategy could become more important.
Yet in many countries, governments marginalise mobile pastoralists and would prefer them to settle instead of roaming the land. Dominant policy narratives cast pastoralism as a backwards, unproductive activity that takes place in marginal fragile areas, where unpredictable rainfall leads people to overgraze and damage the land.
New research coordinated by the International Institute for Environment and Development with funding from the Ford Foundation has identified gaps in such policy narratives in the Indian, Chinese, Kenyan and global contexts. These policy narratives overlook both the dynamics of dryland ecosystems and how dryland communities have long learnt how to live with and harness variability to support sustainable and productive economies, societies and ecosystems.
The narratives ignore the ways that mobile herding can increase people’s resilience in a changing climate. They also ignore the three ‘E’s –the economic value of pastoralism, the environmental benefits that herding brings to rangelands and the equity that should be at heart of good policymaking.
The role of the media
Media stories both contribute to and reflect the dominant policy narrative around pastoralism. As part of the project, I analysed media stories on pastoralism from Kenya, China and India and surveyed dozens of journalists in those countries (see the full research paper or a four-page summary). I found significant gaps – and inter-country differences – in how journalists perceive and portray pastoralists and pastoralism.
In all three countries, important topics such as climate change, and the links between mobility and resilience were under-reported. While 51% of Kenyan articles mentioned drought, only 3% mentioned climate change.
Very few articles in any of the three countries referred to the economic importance of pastoralism (4% in Kenya, 12% in China and 15% in India) or the fact that meat and milk pastoralists produce contributes to food security outside of pastoralist communities (1% in Kenya, 4% in China and 10% in India). The voices of pastoralists feature in less than half of the articles about them (41% of articles in Kenya, 36% in China and 25% in India). Stories that focused on women and children were even less common.
Towards improved narratives
Incomplete media coverage of pastoralism helps to sustain partial narratives that underpin policymaking and this prevent pastoralists from fulfilling their potential to provide food and sustain resilient livelihoods in a changing climate.
Yet opportunities to reframe pastoralism abound. In Kenya, for instance, an alternative narrative could show how the new constitution could work best for the drylands and their communities. In India, an alternative narrative could show how herding is part of the wider dryland agriculture system that can increase food security in the context of climate change. In China, an alternative narrative can relate how support for pastoralism can increase food security and better manage rangelands for economic benefits.
Journalists and editors can act to create more balanced, nuanced and accurate narratives around pastoralism. This will involve reporting on the economics of pastoralism, as well as on the other values of pastoralism that are harder to price. It will involve a better understanding of mobility and markets, of resilience and vulnerability. It will require journalists and researchers to communicate better together and it will require the media to give more voice to the pastoralists themselves.
Donors and development agencies can act to encourage more accurate, relevant and useful media coverage of pastoralism by supporting training programmes, opportunities for journalists to travel to areas where pastoralists live, and initiatives that bring together journalists, pastoralists, dryland researchers and policy makers.
The test of success will be whether future media reports of pastoralism do more to cover the three ‘E’s – environment, economy and equity.
This post was first published on 13 May 2013 on the Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems.
Last year I wrote — here and here — about my study of how media portrayals of pastoralists in China, India and Kenya can contribute to policy narratives that limit people’s resilience to climatic variability. IIED has now published my research and a short briefing paper that presents the main findings and recommendations.
Here is a summary of the research paper, which you can download here [PDF].
Resilient food systems depend on appropriate policies that enable people to take advantage of their own adaptive capacity. Pastoralists use their mobility to take advantage of resources – pasture and water – that are patchily distributed in space and time. Pastoralism can make major contributions to food security, livelihoods and economic prosperity. However, these benefits often go unacknowledged – by policy makers, donors and the public at large. This is in part because of development and media narratives that paint pastoralism as something bad that needs to change. This paper explores how the media portrays pastoralism. To do so, we analysed the content of newspaper articles about pastoralists in Kenya, China and India, and also invited journalists in these countries to complete an online survey and telephone interview. We identified significant gaps – and inter-country differences – in the media’s portrayal of pastoralists.
And here is a summary of the briefing paper, which you can download here [PDF].
Mobile pastoralism contributes substantially to food security, livelihoods and economic prosperity, and can increase resilience to climate change; but policymakers, donors and the public at large tend not to appreciate its benefits. Policy narratives portray pastoralism as an outdated practice, and the media stories that help shape policy processes and public opinion often contribute to these false portrayals. An IIED study analysed the content of stories from media outlets in Kenya, China and India, and surveyed journalists in each country. It identified significant knowledge gaps and inter-country differences in how journalists perceive and portray pastoralists and pastoralism. The analysis also found that media outlets in these countries under-report climate change, the economic value of pastoralism and the links between pastoralist mobility and resilience. Journalists, researchers and pastoralist communities need to work together to improve media coverage of pastoralism, and by doing so highlight pastoralism’s potential contribution to sustainable development in a changing climate.
[I am reposting this piece from 12 March 2012 today, as once again the contest is for UK writers only. Once again it invites writers who ‘have never been to the developing world‘ to submit articles rather than inviting journalists who know their stories intimitately. ]
Once again The Guardian has announced a journalism competition that has international development as its theme, but which excludes journalists in developing countries from entering.
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Suriya Begum is a poor young mother from Bangladesh. When her photograph appeared in a media story about climate change earlier this year, it was only so the article could show a victim — not so it could share her views.
The article presents plenty of facts but doesn’t refer to Suriya’s life or anyone else’s. Tan Copsey of BBC Media Action says this example highlights the potential – wasted in this case – for media outlets to explain what people know, think and feel about climate change.
Speaking at the Climate Communications Day during the COP18 conference in Doha he said: “Don’t you want to know, as a room full of communicators, how she is affected and how she gets her information?”
To answer questions like these on a grand scale, BBC Media Action’s Climate Asia project has interviewed 33,000 people in seven Asian nations. It has asked people about their values, priorities and perceptions, about where they get information, what they experience of climate change and how they react.
The full results aren’t out yet but some things are already clear, said Tan and his co-presenter Lottie Oram.
Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and IIED — where I work — organised the day to explore ways communicators can use new approaches to reach new audiences with information about climate chanage. In the discussion that followed Tan and Lottie’s presentation, it was clear that the gathered experts felt the mainstream media was failing to fulfil its potential.
First — whether in Asia or America or anywhere in between — editors still have some kind of blind-spot when it comes to climate change. There is a climate-change angle to most of what appears in a newspaper but the subject still rarely gets a mention, not even in the final paragraphs.
Even with supportive editors, journalists face some big challenges in reporting on climate change. Imelda Abaño, president of the Philippines Network of Environment Journalists mentioned the risk of danger. Indeed, across the world reporters are threatened, hurt or even killed for reporting on environmental themes.
Compared to the size of the story, media coverage of climate change remains disproportionately small. But the Climate Asia research hints that, for people like Suriya, journalism may be less effective than entertainment. It identified newer approaches to climate communication that appear to be gaining ground.
One idea from Indonesia is a ‘lifestyle-swap’ reality TV show about climate-related migration. In Vietnam, a TV game show pits farmer against farmer to show off and share knowledge of how to adapt agriculture to the changing climate.
These are the kinds of shows that appeal highly to specific audiences. And this is where Climate Asia is set to be a gold mine of information that should help people to better communicate about climate change, thanks to its detailed interviews with over 30,000 people.
At Climate Communications Day in Doha, Tan explained how the interviews in Bangladesh gave deep insights into what climate change means to women like Suriya who live in the slums of Dhaka.
Her priorities: “Her most important priorities are her child and family, shelter, electricity, food, having clean water to drink and staying healthy. She is particularly concerned about the health of her child.”
Her perceptions: “She perceives changes in climate around her. Where previously there were six seasons now she only experiences two – summer and winter. She is very worried about this and changes to her environment.”
Her actions: “She has raised her bed above the ground in case of heavy rains or floods.”
Her needs: “She’d like to do more to respond to the impacts she’s feeling but she doesn’t feel she has enough resources or information about what to do. Other people around her aren’t doing more – which is also important as she values being respected and fitting in people around her. She wants more information on how to conserve and use the resources she has.”
Her trusted sources: “She trusts the information she receives from family, friends and people from her neighbourhood. But she also trusts academics, teachers and religious leaders.”
Her use of media: “She prefers TV to other media – she trusts it because she can see it – she watches TV in a communal area, especially in the early afternoon when she’s finished with her household tasks and men from the slum are at work. She likes Bengali movies and TV drama serials. She talks about what she watches with other women in the slum. She once saw something about climate change on TV but didn’t understand it.”
Journalists and other communicators take note — especially to that final point. It is depressingly familiar. How often do climate-change communicators take the time to understand what audiences know, think and feel about climate change? Not often enough I fear.
*This post first appeared on IIED’s blog
“Banditry, robberies, infiltration of small arms, poaching in the region’s game reserves and national parks and frequent outbreak of livestock diseases are now being attributed to the uncontrolled movement of pastoralists and their animals.”
This sentence, from a 2006 article in Kenya’s The Nation newspaper, encapsulates the way the country’s nomadic herders have been — and continue to be — portrayed in the media there. It echoes the dominant policy narrative, which says pastoralism is a backward system that takes place a harsh, unproductive environment and that when herders move to seek water and pasture they create problems for other people.
But this, say researchers, is a dangerous narrative, one that is blind to the true nature of the lands the pastoralists move across and to the knowledge they draw upon to take advantage of resources that are distributed there in an unpredictable way.
Today, the meat and milk pastoralists provide help to feed a nation. As the climate grows more variable, these people could become even more important cornerstones of Kenya’s economy and food security.
But, in the pages of newspapers there, the herders are not heroes — they are harbingers of conflict and other problems. In short, Kenya’s pastoralists have an image problem. This much became clear when I analysed 100 stories about pastoralists that Kenyan newspapers published between 2000 and 2012.
My study, which will also examine articles from India and China, is part of a larger Ford Foundation funded project. It aims to promote more progressive narratives, and policies that support mobile pastoralism as a rational, productive livelihood in lands where water and vegetation vary in space and time. Some patterns soon emerged:
I supplemented my content analysis with an online survey that 42 Kenyan journalists completed. “The media only gives special attention to pastoralists when there is a crisis, like a major drought or famine where large numbers of people and animals have died,” said one. Another said: “Pastoralism is generally ignored. It only makes headlines when there is cattle-rustling and scores of people are killed.”
I asked the journalists to state five words they associated with pastoralists. The figure below shows the words they chose, with word-size reflecting how often a journalist used it.
It’s a problematic portrait. Yet when asked more specific questions, the journalists revealed knowledge and opinions that seem to contradict the dominant media narrative.
Most (91 per cent) of the journalists acknowledge, for instance, the importance of pastoralism to Kenya’s economy, with more than half of them stating that this is major. This surprised me, given that this was invisible in the stories I analysed. Only 4 per cent of them mentioned it, and not one published a figure such as a shilling, dollar or GDP value.
Other things the journalists said suggest that there is an opportunity for a new narrative to emerge in the Kenyan media, one that does not ignore the social, economic and environmental benefits pastoralists provide.
“The media has neglected pastoralism, since its takes place in far flung areas of northern Kenya which the government has neglected for years,” said one journalist. Another noted that: “Pastoralism has a chance to become a key growth sector for Kenya’s economy if supported by media and policy makers alike.”
A 2011 article, by Peter Mutai for China’s Xinhua news agency, shows another narrative is possible. It manages to overturn much of the prevailing one in just its opening sentence:
“As hunger spreads among more than 12 million people in the Horn of Africa, a new study finds that investments aimed at increasing the mobility of livestock herders, a way of life often viewed as “backward” despite being the most economical and productive use of Kenya’s drylands, could be the key to averting future food crises in arid lands.”
Mobility is the key that pastoralists use to unlock the scattered riches of Kenya’s drylands. The landscape may appear barren, extreme and risky to city-based journalists but the pastoralists have the knowledge and skills to take advantage of the land’s variability and diversity.
The old proverb that says “a fool looks for dung where a cow has never grazed” can perhaps be turned on its head to serve as a reminder of the riches – of stories and more – that a reporter can find if they follow the herd.
[This post was first published on the IIED blog]
A journalism competition with international development as its theme should not exclude journalists in developing countries from entering. Continue reading
Under The Banyan 