New Research Resource: Global South Climate Database

From the Reuters Institute For the Study of Journalism, U. of Oxford:

Few issues feel as global as climate change right now. The impacts and solutions are coming fast from all parts of the world. While rescuers battle floods in Pakistan and Trinidad and Tobago, energy experts are devising transition schemes in South Africa and Austria and insurance managers plan for new impacts in Canada and Mauritius. All corners of the world are affected – but impacts are disproportionately high in the Global South. 

However, the voices narrating this climate story, at least in mainstream media, are less diverse. The conversation is dominated by experts from Europe, North America and Australia, who also come from countries that have contributed the most to rising temperatures. The global majority is mostly sidelined. 

We have witnessed this disparity through different vantage points – from reporting on climate change at Carbon Brief, and from managing a global community of reporters in dozens of newsrooms around the world at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network. 

This is why we have launched the Global South Climate Database, a publicly available, searchable database of climate scientists and experts in the fields of climate science, climate policy and energy. We hope this database can address – at least partly – some of the issues we have seen.

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Journalists in the Philippines and Kenya have told us that their sources complain that European or American experts appear in global media explaining issues about their own countries, while reporters in Mexico and Lebanon regularly struggle to find experts in neighbouring countries. A vicious cycle is created when the same experts from Europe or North America appear in wire stories and global outlets, and become more visible than local sources. This can lead to journalists overwhelmingly contacting experts from the global north for their thoughts on climate science, or directing all of their media requests to a select few well-known global south experts.

To begin to address this gap, Carbon Brief and the Oxford Climate Journalism Network have launched the Global South Climate Database to help reporters to easily find more diverse sources for their stories. More than 400 climate scientists and experts from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Pacific in the fields of climate science, policy and energy have already added their details to the database.

This group comes from 80 different countries and can conduct interviews with reporters in 51 languages, from English to Yoruba to Hindi. Their collective expertise spans fields including road freight decarbonisation, tropical meteorology, mapping carbon sinks, and energy modelling. 

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Direct to Global South Climate Database

Filed under: Interviews, News