News Impact Summit: A new era for climate change reporting

Pick up your badge, grab a coffee, meet someone you don't know yet, and get ready for an inspiring day.

We will find out how Extinction Rebellion's communication strategy has led public concern and action on climate change to record levels. We will also learn what's the movement's next move.

1. Combining science & journalism on YouTube

With Adam Levy

Better known as ClimateAdam, doctor in atmospheric physics Adam Levy explains complex issues around climate change in playful ways on his YouTube channel. Adam will explain how to use social media to combine science and storytelling to hold attention and motivate action on climate change.

2. Transnational collaboration: a way to expose corruption and polluters

With Laurent Richard

We will learn how a team of 40 journalists from 15 countries put together Green Blood - Environmental Scandals an investigation released by Forbidden Stories that tracked supply chains and used open source tools to look into mines in India, Tanzania, and Guatemala that tried to cover up their activities. Forbidden Stories is a consortium devoted to continuing the work of assassinated or jailed reporters.

How to translate science into journalism? How can journalists better relate to the scientific community? Where and how can journalists find reliable sources on climate issues? Three experts discuss the essential questions about science and journalism collaborations and why scientists and journalists should team up to communicate on the climate crisis.

Ahead of climate strikes started by Greta Thunberg, the Financial Times and the Royal Court collaborate on a short drama exploring inaction on climate change and why "we never really learnt how to talk about this". A short screening will be followed by a Q&A with film director and producer Juliet Riddell and will take questions on how she did it and the role of multimedia in improving coverage on climate.

How can we identify which solutions, products and services are sustainable and which aren’t? Jointly developed by the​ Lookout Station ​and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular​, this session will help participants master some of the systems and life cycle thinking tools that can be applied in day-to-day journalistic research. We will investigate today’s fashion industry in order to explore how products are made and uncover the real causes of the climate problem.

Sean will discuss how he used drone photography and filmmaking during his latest project documenting the impacts of rising sea levels and climate change in the remote Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu. Sean will discuss the challenges in pitching this story to editors and how the drone was the secret to getting the work funded and published.

The BBC has been using a Facebook Messenger chatbot to help its audience understand climate change. In this session, Dulcie Lee gives practical tips on when and how a chatbot can be helpful to break down complex topics - particularly if you’re trying to understand exactly what your audience wants to ask.

Climate Covering Now, an initiative headed by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation, brought together more than 300 outlets and partners worldwide with the shared commitment of maximising coverage of the climate crisis in the lead up to the United Nations Climate Summit on September 23. We will find out more about the impact and the future of this initiative.

Sign up for this session to learn from the creator of The Race to Zero Emissions, Quartz’s climate newsletter that’s presented as a report card on the solutions to fight climate change. Akshat will give you tips on writing an engaging newsletter and maybe even help you develop an idea for a newsletter of your own.

We will learn how to investigate and map powerful political networks from two journalists that uncovered the key figures pushing for environmental deregulation via a hard Brexit, and how these characters have embedded themselves into the UK and US governments.

We are facing a new digital reality: even the most security-conscious users can be tricked by a sophisticated online attack. Not surprisingly, those who rely on the unhindered flow of information to do their job—like journalists, activists, and business leaders— face a higher risk of targeted online attacks. During this session you will learn how to be safer online by protecting your online accounts. In the process, you will learn tools and tips to maintain the confidentiality of your investigative work, protect the integrity of your content, and ensure accessibility to the news that you put out. Lessons are applicable on platforms and products across the web.

1. VR & climate justice: working with experts on the ground

With Viktorija Mickute

Virtual Reality Documentaries have the power to illustrate the different impacts of climate change on worldwide communities. This session will explore the use of VR and 360 videos to tell the stories of these communities and how to learn from them.

2. Immersing the audience with scrollytelling

With Juan Heilborn

Visual editor Juan Heilborn will explain how the news platform El Surtidor innovated around mobile journalism, visuals and scrollytelling to create an immersive experience for readers about deforestation in Paraguay. This multimedia project contributed to put pressure on the government, who ended up extending a law to protect the Chaco region, the second most important ecosystem in South America after the Amazon.

3. A magazine on how to avoid climate breakdown

With Hazel Healy

The latest issue of the New Internationalist on climate made an argument for ‘conditional optimism’, combining info on science and peoples’ movements to produce a magazine on how to best *avoid* climate breakdown. The issue inspired a series of live events around the UK that took the debate out to the wider public.

Conclusions and end of Summit programme.

With Adam Vaughan, New Scientist