Exploring planetary boundaries with solutions journalism: AFP and The Conversation's perspective on Sustainable Development

The common thread of the series was an exploration of the 9 planetary boundaries within which humanity must remain to continue to develop and thrive for generations to come and possible paths to achieve this goal.

Both media outlets worked together to publish a total of 18 articles and 20 podcast episodes in French and a limited series in English of 8 podcasts and 7 articles.

About the news outlets

Please describe both media outlets in the way that makes the most sense to you.  You can either describe each of them or merge the two, focusing on collaboration.

• AFP was founded in 1944, after the Second World War and its headquarters are in Paris. It is a leading international independent news agency that serves thousands of media clients across the world, in text, photo, live and broadcast, video and graphics. Its podcasts are with its YouTube channels and other social media, the only products for the general public. AFP has 2,300 employees – among them 1,700 journalists - working from 150 bureaus across the world.  
• The Conversation began in Melbourne, Australia, in March 2011. The UK edition launched in May 2013, followed by editions in the US (2014), South Africa and France (2015), Canada, Indonesia and New Zealand (2017), Spain (2018), and Brasil (2023). The Conversation is a unique collaboration between academics and journalists that in a decade has become the world’s leading publisher of research-based news and analysis. The  Conversation has one daily newsletter and 3 weekly ones. There are  120,000 subscriptions to these newsletters. There are over 6 million page views per month on The Conversation’s website. The Conversation France has a team of 18 journalists.

The following interview was conducted with Michaëla Cancela-Kieffer (editor of audio at AFP) and Gabrielle Maréchaux (journalist environment and energy at The Conversation France)

About the project

Why did you decide to embark on this SoJo journey?

I was introduced to solutions journalism a while ago, by my friend Alfredo Casares and always thought we should experiment with it at AFP. In 2022, I met a SoJo ambassador at the international journalism festival in Perugia, Shirish Kulkarni and shared with him a podcast investigation project. The project was about the real impact of carbon offsets and had a strong SoJo angle as we aimed to find out if it was a good solution to help reduce our CO2 emissions. Shirish mentioned the SJA grant and encouraged me to apply. Our first try was unsuccessful but we tried again in 2023 with a different project. At that point, I was convinced solutions journalism was a very important way to fight news fatigue and engage audiences taken aback by the multiple simultaneous crises experienced by the world (Ukraine war, climate and biodiversity crisis, Covid…). This project would help us practise in-depth solutions journalism for a year and learn and experiment with its impact on our audience. 

Why did AFP decide to join forces with The Conversation? 

At the time we worked on this application, we were also in talks with The Conversation to create a new collaborative format and “Voices of the Global South” (the original name of the project) was the perfect opportunity as we knew we would need academic and scientific sources.  Although our organisations are very different, we share a large global and multilingual network and a culture of evidence-based journalism.

Which under-reported subjects and which different angles of already-reported concepts did you aim for in your projects?

The concept of planetary boundaries is gaining ground but it has remained in scientific circles. We wanted to find ways to make it accessible to a large public, by breaking down our explanations of each planetary boundary with vivid on-the-ground examples: such as water in Namibia, Tunisia or the Colorado River basin, forests in Gabon, CO2 emissions seen from Peru.. 

We did not want to leave our audience with a doomsday feeling and show them that there are actions underway to tackle these problems. We also wanted to demonstrate the limits of some of these solutions promoted by the “North”  and alternatives in the Global South.

In what ways has the grant impacted your reporting and contributed to amplifying voices and solutions from the Global South? 

It was a life-changing opportunity. 

As editor of audio at AFP I now always tell my team to never end a difficult story without some exploration of the solutions. Internally I have become an advocate of it. As an Associate professor at Sciences Po Journalism School, I am also advocating for the inclusion of in-depth solutions journalism and “complicating the narrative” techniques as a way for the media to survive in a highly polarised environment.  Solutions journalism is also essential for reporters’ mental health as they are on the front line when it comes to news fatigue and depression induced by our multi-crisis era. 

It has definitely amplified the voices of the global south as it was one of our ground rules for every episode and/or article. 

Can you describe how your two media outlets worked together on the project? 

We had weekly meetings to discuss angles and share sources. Our mentor Anne Sophie Novel was also present. Her presence was really valuable as she has a deep understanding of environmental issues and she could guide us when we had practical questions about solutions journalism. The release of episodes and articles was coordinated and we cross-referenced each other. Readers could listen to the podcast (which usually would cover the “big picture”) and listeners could discover another, in-depth angle of the story by  The Conversation. Podcasts and article releases were also mentioned in a newsletter by the Conversation. 

How did applying solutions journalism affect your newsrooms and processes? 

As a tangible positive outcome, we prepared a memo about the basic rules of Solutions Journalism and how it could be a very creative way to find new stories and angles which was circulated among our “planet” team. 

In terms of processes, it is important to stress that a good solutions journalism story takes time. 

Did solutions journalism change engagement with your audience in any way? How were the solutions journalism stories perceived by your audience?

We believe we have succeeded. 

As written in our impact report, “by the end of this series, [AFP] have reached the milestone of 10,000 listens per episode for all but two (which still reached over 9,000 listens). The rest of them surpassed that threshold. The total for the series reaches 254 K listens, averaging 12K per episode,  which, for the French market, is considered a success”. 

The Conversation’s text series also had great results, especially syndication-wise (see below). The total page views reached 245K. 

The podcast also generated more engagement (comments left by the audience via the Spotify app) from listeners than any other episodes.  We have definitely become a reference for communication agencies that send us all kinds of interview opportunities about “solutions”. And people who do get in touch always mention “Sur le Fil” and “Sur la Terre” which have become brand names for our podcast production. 

What challenges did you encounter and how did you address them?

We mentioned in earlier reports the barriers we faced to reach Global South sources, such as lack of data, difficulties finding the proper experts, and freedom of expression: they all explain why the Global South voices are under-represented. We therefore had to double our efforts to reach those voices. We addressed the problem by spending a lot more time reporting and finding sources than planned. Our recommendation is to anticipate the time needed for Global South reporting, especially if it is done from abroad. For future projects, we would also recommend fostering investigative and cross-border programs that would encourage media organisations from the Global North and South to work together and programs that would help scientists in the Global South better communicate with the media and platforms where they can be found.

Besides, AFP is mainly a breaking news media, and breaking news is more often about bad than good news. Also breaking news happens fast and is chased by the newest thing leaving little time to investigate. That makes it more difficult to conduct thorough investigations on “solutions”. 

What insights or lessons did you gain from this project? 

The Global South perspective added something unique and also changed forever our vision of global environmental stories. We did have theoretical knowledge about the under-representation of Global South voices – this issue was at the heart of our application – but this “real life” experiment gave us new insights into the impact of “Global North” solutions in the Global South countries.

As for the journalistic practice I have discovered a new way to find fresh and very interesting, different, inspiring story ideas: this could be the best argument to convince editors to try. 

From  The Conversation France, since this project, we have tried as much as we can to have local scientists involved whenever we begin a new story that is tackling an issue in the Global South. That is what we did for instance with our story on the paradox of climate data in West Africa, our story on the role of urban growth on flooding in Dakar, or our story on weather prediction in Senegal.

To what extent do you plan to continue or expand your solutions journalism reporting practices beyond the grant period?

Some habits are now part of my team’s day-to-day at AFP: now we do explore what the solutions can be even when working on a “problem” story, such as polarisation. But to do in-depth stories we need more staffing. 

We are currently exploring ways to launch Season 2 of “Sur la Terre”.  Basically, we need to decide what topics we want to explore and how we can finance the project. Now that one of the podcasts has been shortlisted for a price at the prestigious Paris Podcast Festival (578 applicants, 40 podcasts shortlisted), we hope that can help. The added difficulty is our own ethical standards that limit the type of financing we can receive. 

At The Conversation, we continue to follow some of the topics that we started to look at for this project, for instance, legal animism, with a new analysis of previous cases in New Caledonia and an ongoing initiative regarding the Mediterranean Sea. The newsroom received a presentation about the 4 pillars of solutions journalism. 

What advice would you give to other journalists or organisations interested in pursuing solutions journalism reporting on issues related to the Global South?

• Bear in mind that SoJo takes time and articles, podcasts or videos will be longer.
• If you are a “Global North”  organisation, team up with local journalists and/or local media so that you can access local sources and your reporting can be shared locally and be beneficial for local populations.    
• Do not take for granted Global North companies and even NGOs communications on projects conducted in the Global South, always find a way to check on the ground as, too often, the outcome is not what is announced. 
• Be sensitive to security issues for your local sources, do not expose them.

About the Solutions Journalism Accelerator

The Solutions Journalism Accelerator is a programme by the European Journalism Centre (EJC) in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network delivering grant funding to support solutions-focused development journalism in European news organisations. The programme is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

For the purpose of this programme, we define solutions journalism as a practice that investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, how people try to solve widely shared problems.

While journalists usually define news as ‘what’s gone wrong’, solutions journalism tries to expand this notion by emphasising that ‘what works’ is also newsworthy. By adding rigorous, evidence-based coverage of solutions, journalists can tell the whole story.

Download our  free Solutions Journalism guides:

• Solutions Journalism: an introduction for journalists and newsrooms
• Solutions Journalism: 11 tough questions on how to do solutions journalism​
• Solutions Journalism: an introduction to solutions-focused development reporting

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Header Image: Climate protesters pour oil over themselves as scuffles between police and protesters broke out with the use of tear gas during a demonstration on the outskirts of the Paris venue for TotalEnergies Annual General Meeting in Paris on May 26, 2023. The French oil and gas giant is gearing up for an electric meeting, targeted by a coalition of associations threatening to block it, but also by some of its shareholders who disagree with its climate policy.

Geoffroy Van der Hasselt / AFP