Witnessing the Human Cost of Climate Change

Listen to full audio of the panel and Q&A session here.
Read a transcript of the discussions from this panel here.
Read a transcript of New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter John Pope's presentation here.

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BONN, Germany — The water temperatures this year in the Atlantic basin, where hurricanes have their genesis, have reached the highest levels on record. Whether that is the result of an uncommonly hot year or more proof of a rising trend in global temperatures is something we’ll only know for certain years from now. By then, the human cost of climate change, be it measured in the numbers of people washed out of their homes in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico or by widespread famines in Africa, will also be more readily quantifiable.

Speaking at a recent Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum panel entitled "Witnessing the Human Cost of Climate Change" moderated by Dart Centre Europe, three seasoned environmental and health reporters from Ethiopia, Haiti and the United States put statistical tables and policy reports aside to focus on the challenge of witnessing the human cost of climate change.

How can journalists continue to report effectively and with insight when they and their own families and communities are battered by an environmental catastrophe

'Covering Katrina felt like covering a war'

“We publish — come hell and high water” was the logo on the t-shirts worn by The New Orleans Times-Picayune staff, when Hurricane Katrina swept through the city in 2005 and forced the newspaper to relocate to nearby Baton Rouge after the flood waters surrounded their offices.

The Times-Picayune reporter John Pope told the forum that covering events in the storm-swept city was like being in a war zone.

Major media in the U.S. and beyond covered the unfolding catastrophe as if it were a foreign-reporting assignment. But the problem for Pope and his colleagues was that unlike journalists who had come there on assignment, they couldn’t rotate back to base for rest and recovery. It was their homes and their lives that were under water.

Their determination to pull together and carry on reporting, regardless of their own personal losses, was what kept them together as individuals: “We were there for each other and that is the main thing,” he said. "Getting into a routine was a psychological good thing and kept us focused on our job rather than on the chaos around us.”

Roosevelt Jean Francois, the director of CECOSIDA, a grass-roots community organisation for journalists in Haiti, a country prone to catastrophic mudslides and flooding, described how after the January 2010 earthquake, he and his colleagues went into auto-pilot and kept on reporting. Only later did they have time to process what had happened to them personally.

After the immediate worst had stabilised, both Pope and Jean Francois were involved with Dart Centre workshops that were held in New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, respectively, with the intention of fostering local peer support.

"You cannot cope with [such] a terrible situation yourself,” Jean Francois told the audience at the Deutsche Welle forum. Weeks after the earthquake, he described watching colleagues running outside after sensing phantom aftershocks.

The experience of just sitting together and listening to other journalists' personal accounts of what they had gone through helped tremendously.

"Some of them said that [talking to other journalists] was the first time they felt normal after four weeks. That means you know that what happened to me, what I feel, is the same feeling that you have.”

Seeing Others Clearly

And yet Jean Francois cautioned against journalists projecting their own experiences on to the survivors they are interviewing.

“Our job as a reporter is to focus on that human being and put oneself into their position,” he said. “If someone is in a difficult situation, get the context first and see where that person stands.”

All three panelists emphasized that the ability to stand at the centre of a mass-casualty crisis and report in a clear-sighted way, when one may oneself be experiencing loss, fear, or grief, is far from straightforward.

Argaw Ashine, director of the Ethiopian Environment Journalists Association, noted that every two or three years, famine affects some community in his country.

He told the audience in Bonn that the sadness one feels when covering these stories does not diminish with experience and time. When arriving in a house where a mother is tending a dying child, one’s first thought should not be to ready the microphone.

“It is the first thing for me as an Ethiopian to bring food and some water to my people — to help and not to report first,” Ashine explained.

But helping effectively is often beyond an individual journalist’s capacity, and the best one can do is to expose the underlying reasons for why a particular drought has killed.

Those with regular access to food tend to think of hunger as a temporary condition, but in the semi-arid desertification-prone areas, absolute hunger, barely without cessation, is a daily reality for many.

Ashine, who has worked across East Africa, likened interviewing in those conditions to speaking to somebody “with a bullet in the brain.”

All three speakers suggested that understanding the personal toll this work could take was an important component in developing the stamina and insight necessary to persevere in the long run, especially for anyone hoping to effectively critique the political and economic response to environmental degradation.

Familiarity and Distance

When journalists experience a disaster at home, might they sometimes be too close to traumatic events to see them clearly? Are journalists who come in from outside more detached and thus more able to accurately report events?

Despite the personal toll of Katrina, Pope was sure that the participation of journalists bearing witness to the tragedy who were also part of the community affected by the hurricane strengthened The Times-Picayune's reporting: “Because we were covering a catastrophe that had devastated our community, we asked tougher questions, and we were more persistent because these were answers that we needed, too."

The other panelists also agreed that being local can be more of an advantage than a hindrance, especially in identifying significant story angles.

Pope described the personal assault of seeing New Orleans, his home city, disappear under water after Hurricane Katrina struck. Nevertheless, he felt that involvement improved his work: “I think it made us better reporters. " he said. "This was our home, and we wanted to make sure that we were doing what we could to make things right.”

Pope eschewed the word “objectivity,” preferring to say instead: “In what my colleagues and I did, I think we were, unfailingly, fair.”

Indeed, the difficulties these reporters experienced locating their own medical records and processing insurance claims for their damaged homes, for example, led them straight to vital stories, the kinds of stories that are usually only picked up much later.

Gavin Rees, director of Dart Centre Europe and the panel’s moderator, noted that even journalists working in comfortable studios far away from an event can respond to trauma in ways that might blunt their judgment.

During the crises in Haiti and New Orleans, the world’s news networks were circulating often unverified rumours that “people had descended into some feral state of madness,” he said. Babies, it was alleged, were being raped in New Orleans, and Haiti, in the days following the quake, was said to be overrun with mobs of looters.

For Pope, one of the great achievements of New Orleans journalists was their determination to set out and see if they could substantiate any of these rumours. Their reporting, which showed many claims to be grossly inflated, brought down city and state officials and won The Times-Picayune publication numerous journalism prizes.

“We reporters had an obligation to pull ourselves together and go out and try to explain what we see,” he said. “This is, after all, what we do.”

Close to Home: Reporting Local Disasters

Panelists: Argaw Ashine, director of the Ethiopian Environment Journalists Association, Roosevelt Jean-Francois, of the Haitian grassroots media group CECOCIDA and John Pope, of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Read an article about this panel here.
Listen to full audio of this panel and Q&A session here.
Read a transcript of John Pope's presentation from this panel here.

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John Pope: "After Katrina rumours were running wild and our brave colleagues who stayed in New Orleans had to make sense of it. Our police chief was repeating anything that was told him. And there were stories of babies being bayoneted, of people being killed every night. So our team looked into all of those allegations, which was not easy given the difficulty of communication. Yet, we published a frontpage story saying in essence, 'Hey, these didn’t happen.' The next day he was gone.

“There was a lot of interest in New Orleans among the people who were far away. And so we were reporting to let people know who have evacuated, part of our diaspora, what is going on. And what was really cool was what came out on our website. People we were setting themselves up on our website, like I am in this part of New Orleans, if you are reading this on NOLA.com let me know where your house is, and I will go and check on it. And so we became some sort of message, board and trying to make sense of what was going on. And also, people who were coming in out of town were repeating whatever they were told without having and sources to check with, and that was part of our job.”

Question from audience: “Going along the lines that you just mentioned about being a member of the community and also being a journalist, did you ever find yourself caught in a situation where you had to compromise your professional responsibility as a journalist with the moral obligation of being caught in the catastrophe?”

John Pope: “Never, and I am not being self-righteous here. I felt that the two were identical. This was not an example of boosterism, just mindless chauvinism. We were trying to get to the truth of what had happened, we were trying to understand what had gone on to make some sort of sense of it. That means that we were part of the community, sure, but we were also reporters and those roles actually worked together very well.”

Gavin Rees: “In traumatic situations, everybody’s reaction is different, but there are certain patterns of responses that individuals have. In the middle of a disaster somebody might be hyper-alert or very wired. They might get a tunnel vision when they can only see certain things and miss other things that are happening around them. They may have intrusive images, images of the threat of the car crash, of the gun, constantly re-appearing in their mind.

“And these are natural adjustments that a human being may really need to function in a conflict situation or a traumatic situation – it doesn’t mean that they are going to be impaired by them.

“Just as somebody on the ground can have a trauma reaction, so can national media have a trauma reaction. One of the paradoxes of these situations is that very often the most accurate reporters were the reporters on the ground trying to cover the story. They were using their sense that their job really mattered to overcome those personal tunneling reactions.

“However, the rest of the world’s media was also having a trauma reaction, and so this is maybe why in Katrina, you have this ridiculous, over-inflated reporting, these rumours that were circulating around that small babies were being raped in the Superdome and that there was looting on every single street corner. The idea that people had descended into some feral state of madness was the same in Haiti.

“And so who is objective? A lot of the media, who were working outside in nice, comfortable studios were also going through some kind of trauma process. We all saw this on 9/11 and the Twin Towers: how the first reaction was to imagine that the fatality rates must be absolutely enormous and then over a few days they all came down, and that is a natural, or at least a frequent response.”

Nathan Witkop, DW Environment Correspondent: “I was wondering if you could give some concrete examples about how you went about confirming that something didn’t happen in such an extreme environment. Presumably people who have fled or they are not answering their phones, or they are in a remote community and so who do you actually speak to confirm things?”

John Pope: “Well, I had built up a network of sources. I had been writing about medicine for about 20 years before Katrina struck and I had a network of sources and their cellphone numbers. If they had evacuated, I was able to get to them and I was able to run-down rumours that I had been hearing. I had been hearing stories about diphtheria, typhoid, stuff that just was not true.

“The state epidemiologist, a wonderful man named Dr. Raoult Ratard‚ he looks like Santa Claus and sounds like Hercule Poirot and was just wonderful about this, because he was as eager to get the message out also.

“That’s what I did. For two months I felt like the man who sweeps up after the elephants at the circus [i.e. the national and international reporters coming in from outside.] I was saying in essence, just calm down.

“A crisis is no time to be making new friends. You need to establish your sources as you go along and get their cellphone numbers and that is how you get to them.

Roosevelt Jean-Francois: “For a short time in Haiti, it was impossible for 24, 48 hours to confirm information. With Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, with the social media, this was the only way, because all the cellphones went down and the main telephone company was not working. But the internet was working in some places.

“But to use MySpace or Facebook, you must have a network, and so the network is the most important thing.

“The second thing is that you have to go with the local journalists. And I do agree with Gavin; for you don’t discover a place in crisis; you discover a place before. You should have someone who knows people, who knows where to go, who knows what to do to help you. Even if you are from Haiti, to go in a lot of places is not easy.

“And the third thing is to have relationships with local authorities, because you have to attribute the information. There was a lot of disinformation and misunderstanding during the very first day.

“One question: how many people have been killed. When we are reporting about number, who to attribute 200,000 people killed. Who said that? We challenged the Prime Minister, who said that number: 'How do you know about this?' After three weeks you will have more information than you had before. It is a continuing and very difficult process."