Redefining journalism on the frontline of climate change

Ms Vivian Chime is a multiple award-winning climate reporter and the head of the climate desk at ‘The Cable’ a Nigerian-based online newspaper. She speaks to AWiM News about her childhood dream of telling community-focused stories and how fate led her to her dreams which she is now living through climate reporting.

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It is said that ‘once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.’ This was exactly the case for Ms Vivian who as a little girl, imagined herself telling stories just like the people she had seen on television.

She started by casually mimicking the presenters she watched at that time while standing before the mirror in her room, telling her mum or anyone who cared to listen that she wanted to be like them.

Like a bus driven by another person, life eventually started taking a turn, in a direction she didn’t want but couldn’t do anything since she wasn’t the one driving.

Her dad who was a legal practitioner at that time when parents were known to make career choices for their kids wanted her to follow his path.

“After high school,  I applied for admission to study Law at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University but was denied admission. Then I eventually applied for Mass Communication at the University of Nigeria and got admitted. I was excited when fate finally brought me where I was originally meant to be.” Vivian told AWiM news.

At college, she took her schoolwork more seriously and went overboard just to write class assignments. She recalls once scheduling an interview with the school Deputy Vice Chancellor, visiting the Nigerian prison, attending plenary sessions held by the student Union and once attending a trade fair held in the school just to write stories for a class assignment. These were considered too big for just class assignments by others but all she wanted was to build her capacity as a journalist which later set her up to start publishing stories for big media organisations as soon as she graduated.

Vivian’s first port of call in climate reporting came in 2019 when she went for her one-year National Youth Service and was posted to a radio station in Calabar, a city in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

“While working there, there was a dumpsite located not far away from the radio station where I worked. That was where the waste collected from the entire city is dumped and the stench from the dumpsite was almost everywhere in the community hosting our radio station.” Vivian said.

She noticed that residents of the community usually keep their doors and windows shut due to the stench leading to poor ventilation. Also, mosquito bites became normalized causing increased health challenges.

“I started reporting their story trying to highlight the several environmental problems in the city. I liaised with the ministry of environment to bring them on my show to talk about what they’re going to do to remedy the situation and that yielded positive results because it made them sit on that hot seat on the radio to talk about ways of remedying the situation.”  She added.

For the young reporter, community reporting has always been her passion, and so being introduced to climate reporting allowed her to tell the untold stories of people at the grassroots who feel like help cannot get to them.

“The impact of climate change is felt more at the grassroots. They are the people on the frontline, they are the ones cooking with firewood and living close to water bodies, living in shelters constructed with just zinc, thatch, or mud. They are the ones that get hit the hardest when the impact of climate change like floods and rainfall comes.

“All these endeared me to climate reporting because it helps me to tell the stories of impoverished people who risk their lives as a result of the government’s inability to take actions that will help them adapt.” She continued.

But one thing stood in her way of living this dream to the fullest. And that was the fact that she did not know much about climate reporting since it wasn’t a famous beat at that time and was never mentioned to her in college as one of the beats in the journalism profession.

More than a third of the world’s adults and nearly two-thirds of adults in countries such as South Africa, Bangladesh, and Nigeria have never heard of climate change. This is highly attributable to poor media coverage of climate issues, especially in Africa where it was never considered a beat worth giving much attention to until recently.

A study of how the print media in two African countries (Nigeria and South Africa) reported climate change in two three-month periods in 2009 and 2010, reveals that two Nigerian newspapers (The Guardian and Vanguard) published 79 articles on climate change, equivalent to less than 0.1% of the total number of articles published. Likewise, the two South African newspapers (The Star and The Mail & Guardian) published 96 articles representing just 0.3% of the total number of articles.

Determined to successfully navigate this road less travelled, Vivian set out to better understand climate reporting by speaking to experts, reading available resources, and doing personal research. It was during this search that she came across an opportunity to apply for Climate Tracker’s fellowship for global media mentorship.

“I got into the fellowship in January 2021 and that was where I got to learn about climate change and how it affects people. From there I started doing more stories on climate change going to different parts of the city to do stories on climate change and the environment.” She said.

Vivian’s first climate story was about how climate change was exacerbating erosion in different parts of Calabar. In the story, she reported how a young girl fell alongside a fraction of her family house which was destroyed by erosion, and lost her life.

Since then, she has attended trainings, been a climate tracker fellow twice, written several environmental reports, and won multiple grants and awards for her work including an award from Climate Tracker for submitting the highest number of stories during the 27^th Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP27) held in Egypt last year.

But one thing stands Vivian out among most other climate reporters; while covering stories in remote villages, she doesn’t stop at just getting information from her sources or asking how climate change has affected their lives; rather, she helps them adapt better by talking to them about climate change so they understand that there has been a shift from the previous ways of doing things due to changes in world climate.

“Climate reporting needs awareness as many people do not even know the impact of climate change. Most farmers in the villages still farm using old practices of just planting crops and expecting them to yield without applying some of those climate-smart approaches that will help crops grow better. These are the people that I intend to reach using climate reporting.” She says.

For Vivian, the goal is to get to the point where climate change becomes a household name that everyone knows and talks about the same way COVID-19 was talked about. This she says will help people know more about it to better adapt to its impact.

But it is not all a bed of roses for Vivian being one of the very few women bold enough to venture into climate reporting. According to her, one would practically climb seven mountains and swim seven rivers just to cover a story.

While it is not all easy for both men and women journalists, Vivian says some hurdles are peculiar to women owing to the patriarchal nature of African society. One of those challenges is that women journalists who travel to communities are sometimes prone to intimidation and different kinds of harassment.

She recalls travelling to a community to cover a story on renewable energy.  “This community has no electricity but residents use solar panels to charge their phones. I was going round from house to house taking pictures of this when one man approached me and started yelling at me. I was alone in that community and after many verbal harassments, the man left with his bike threatening to call the youths of the village to make sure I don’t leave there alive. My producer later intervened and that was how I left unhurt.”

Despite such experiences journalists like Vivian have to put up with, she believes climate reporting is where everyone needs to be right now because it revolves around every part of human existence.

“There’s an intersection between climate change and health, gender, politics, etc. At COP 27, almost every organisation present came for their own agender. The WHO was there for Climate change and health, water organisations came there for climate change and water, and gender organisations were there for Climate change and gender. This tells that climate change impacts every aspect of our life and with the way things are going, climate change is capable of destroying everything we’ve all worked so hard for.” She lamented.

After attending the COP27 conference in Egypt last year, Vivian says she now understands that there’s a big divide between what happens on the global stage and what happens locally which is the more reason journalists need to close this divide, write local stories about it and amplify it to the world.

“The people being affected by climate change are not getting the needed action. It’s not just about talking and talking at conferences, go into communities and see people suffering. We need to start talking about climate change hypocrisy, of promising and not doing, the inability of countries to access the climate finance claimed to have been allocated to them.” She says.

The climate reporter added that COP27 laid bare the poor representation of women in tables where climate issues are discussed. In her words, only a few women from the global south made it to the conference even though they are the worst hit by the impact of the climate crisis.

She claims this is why more women need to take part in telling stories of fellow women affected by climate change through climate reporting because no other can tell it better.

“Recently my organisation told us to prioritize women’s voices in our reports. Even when you have male options, make sure to find a female voice. That’s where the media can come in. This will encourage other women to speak up instead of shying away.” She concludes.

This article is part of the African Women in Media (AWIM) Graduate Trainee Programme in collaboration with Fojo Media Institute.