This March, Cyclone Idai swirled toward the Mozambican coast from the Indian Ocean, an alarming boil of colors crossing weather channel screens. When it touched land, it reached levels of intensity that solidified its place in recent history as the worst weather-related disaster to strike the Southern Hemisphere.
The damage left in the storm’s wake — millions displaced and billions of dollars in infrastructure costs — indicated a looming problem. Due to climate change, weather-related natural disasters have been expected to increase drastically in frequency and intensity worldwide. Just weeks after Idai, a second record-breaking cyclone, Cyclone Kenneth, further devastated Mozambique, confirming this projection.
And yet, coverage and aid for Cyclone Idai took several days to arrive and waned within weeks. Cyclone Kenneth barely made a news blip. The result was an overwhelmed country, pressed beyond its ability to transport resources, communicate information, and assist endangered families.
These cyclones are no isolated incident. A 2013 study on natural disaster coverage from 2000 to 2010 found that while news topics typically have a life of about 18.5 months, natural disasters — in the United States alone — get about 12 months of coverage, with almost two thirds of that coverage coming in the first 30 days after the disaster. Additionally, disparities in coverage and subsequent aid across different regions of the world are stark to say the least. So why do these disastrous events fizzle so quickly in the media cycle?
Off the Grid
Any news story involves a reciprocal relationship between the reporter and those being reported on. The Irish Times pointed out that although the coverage of Cyclones Idai and Kenneth was inadequate, this lack of content resulted largely from low internet penetration within the areas hit the hardest, making it difficult for survivors to communicate information about the disasters.
According to the International Telecommunications Union, in 2017 sub-Saharan Africa more countries with under 9 percent of the population able to access the internet than any other region worldwide. This perpetuates a broader separation between these vulnerable areas and the more economically developed ones. Social media has emerged as the modern medium of coordinating relief efforts. The more limited the communication from the site itself, the less thorough the analysis and response the disaster receives.
The Waiting Game
Another consistent pattern is equally troubling: Countries with a lack of local journalists and first responders have no one available to actually coordinate a response immediately after a disaster strikes. Countries like Mozambique, without the independent resources to invest in local journalism or robust emergency services, must wait for both journalism and aid to come from abroad.
Gregory C. Carr, the president of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, identified this as a central problem in an interview with the HPR. “This is normal, not unusual to Mozambique or Cyclone Idai,” he explained. “When a disaster hits … the professional disaster responders could be anywhere in the world. They are going to need a number of days or weeks to mobilize.” The wait for influential foreign journalists and aid agencies to arrive happens during the crucial period in which most people are left in critical danger and during which most damage occurs. And Carr has taken on this problem, at least where he can control it, by training his park teams to act as immediate first responders after cyclones.
Finding the Big Picture
Even after Mozambique started receiving that attention from foreign journalists and aid, it was insufficient for the country’s rebuilding needs. Carr partially attributed this to a broader trend in journalism: Investigative journalism budgets are stalling or declining precisely as the frequency of these disasters is increasing, creating a concerning gap. “Climate change is upon us. There will be more disasters, needing more quality journalism to cover them. However, in the age of the internet, a lot of the ‘traditional media’ is seeing their budgets decline.” The result? Coverage is abandoned quickly as journalists are forced to pursue the next headline.
Constraints on budget and time also skew the media’s focus towards the most dramatic elements of a disaster, often inaccurately reflecting the larger picture. Mainstream news outlets courting viewership sometimes offer extreme angles without context, making assessment of — and response to — the situation difficult and weak.
Two women walk through flooded land after the cyclone.
What Is A “Disaster” Anyway?
This July, Mami Mizutori, the U.N. assistant secretary general for disaster risk reduction, pointed out that while large-scale climate-related natural disasters receive coverage and aid, more small-scale climate crises with the potential to damage communities do not. What is more, Mizutori reported, is that that these small-scale climate disasters are now occurring at a rate of approximately one per week worldwide.
In an interview with the HPR, Mizutori expanded: “What we have noticed is that [these] disasters have been always affecting all countries, but the trend we’ve been seeing in the past 30 years is that 90 percent of all disasters are related in one way or another to what we believe is climate change.” The consequences of low-intensity or “slow-onset” disasters such as droughts, heat waves, flash floods, and landslides — events which would not normally receive major news coverage — are growing more serious in terms of loss of life, economic damage, and geographical spread, Mizutori confirmed.
One example of a “slow-onset” and often overlooked disaster is groundwater depletion. Former NASA hydrologist and science communicator James Famiglietti said in an interview with the HPR that of the world’s 37 major aquifers, about 20 are past the “sustainability tipping point”: “About 50 percent of the water we use for irrigation comes from groundwater. As that groundwater disappears, the sustainability of our food supply begins to erode.”
While an issue like groundwater depletion amounts to a potential “crisis of epic proportions,” it is hard to communicate, he noted, as groundwater is not visible. This is troubling, especially given its implications for climate change and population growth. “As there is more drought, we’re going to use more groundwater; but if there’s more drought, there’s no rain, so there’s less replenishment of the groundwater … Throw in a little population growth, and it’s a perfect storm.” Indeed, drought has been acknowledged as one of the major propellants of civil war in Syria, where drought-based resource scarcity sparked a mass migration from rural to urban areas that escalated social tensions.
Such an alarming conclusion suggests the danger of maintaining such a narrow view of what constitutes a newsworthy disaster while so many threats to humanity fester and interconnect beyond the public view. And it confirms that leading publications and governments are more preoccupied with relief aid and short-term mitigation than analysis of, and adaptation to, trends. “The problem is that because of the increasing frequency and severity of these disasters … there simply isn’t enough money for relief,” Mizutori concluded — the amount of money pledged at the donor conference for Cyclone Idai relief was less than half of what was necessary, she said. The result of all these dynamics is a vicious cycle, in which disaster relief falls short and disaster preparation does not follow.
Many stakeholders involved in climate science, disaster management, and journalism have concluded that the conventional 24-hour news cycle fails to capture the sustained attention the issues require, and have sought to develop some alternatives.
Strengthening the Home Front
To ensure that more frequent disasters in more vulnerable places are better reported — and subsequently managed — going forward, people like Carr and Mizutori have focused their energy on emboldening capacity at the local level through two key initiatives: cultivating local journalism and investing in infrastructure. With less reliance on foreign training and money, informed local journalists can provide accurate and contextualized information, and relief institutions can immediately begin helping the most vulnerable. “Local journalists will not only be there when the disaster happens … they could stay [permanently] after the international media has gone on to the next disaster,” Carr explained, underscoring the importance of supporting strong local journalism.
Journalism also plays a crucial role in ensuring the accountability of aid programs and government programs during the relief and rebuilding process. After a major disaster, wealthy donors pledge money or services at major donor conferences. Journalists ensure that the public pressure stays on these donors to follow through on their pledges; they also monitor the integrity of the organizations designated to handle the funds.
But infrastructure is also at the heart of the issue. Improving housing, reducing social inequality, and investing in disaster risk mitigation, Mizutori thinks, are key to escaping the cycle of insufficient short-term donations and minimizing unnecessary damage. Carr highlighted the importance of empowering the world’s poorest communities, who, in Mozambique, had their unstable houses completely swept away by storm: “We all know that poor people suffer in storms more than wealthy people, who tend to live on higher ground and have more stable housing. This is a long-term issue for this century.”
Sticking with the Narratives
Natalia Antelava told the HPR that “there are two things blatantly missing from the way the mainstream media covers crisis in general … one is context, another is continuity.” She is an investigative journalist, the editor-in-chief at Coda Story, and a former foreign correspondent at the BBC.
Understanding the complex relationships between different factors during a disaster is crucial, but not easy. Antelava has been struck by the lack of context surrounding disaster coverage; during the 2008 Burma cyclone, for instance, the key links between the disaster and Burma’s subsequent political turnover were completely overlooked. This lack of context makes it harder to extract broader trends from the news, which “really affects our ability as journalists to explain the world … and, as consumers of news, to understand the world,” Antelava explained.
“Mainstream media is terrible at staying on stories,” she expanded. “By definition, the newspaper and broadcast [were] always created for disposable platforms … The format we’re used to creating still carries that legacy of those disposable formats, even though current platforms are no longer disposable.” The answer to the flaws in the news cycle, then, may not come from reforming existing update-oriented systems; it may instead lie in creating new, depth-oriented platforms.
Antelava’s response was to found Coda Story, an independent journalism outlet whose mission statement reads: “Coda takes one crisis at a time and deploys a team of local and international reporters, video journalists, artists and designers to think through what themes and stories fuel each crisis.” By providing continuous investigation into a few complex issues, it informs consumers about the nuanced nature of the issues from the perspective of those who are experiencing them.
A helicopter prepares to drop food and supplies to a family stranded by Cyclone Idai.
The New Mainstream
However, even in the field of traditional journalism, adaptations are underway. Journalist Carol Davenport has reported on the fight in Washington over climate change policy for the New York Times since 2006. In an interview with the HPR, she attributed changes in climate change reporting to growing levels of concern among career government employees.
“In this administration, a lot of career employees who historically would never have wanted to or wouldn’t be allowed to talk to reporters are so stressed by some of the policies they see happening … that they talk to reporters in a way that they haven’t before.” She added that many officials seek reporters through encrypted technologies to maintain anonymity.
What is more, Davenport said, the scientific evidence is now clear enough that journalists can immediately link a weather event to climate change. Coverage of natural disasters can explicitly and certainly draw the connection to the larger phenomenon of climate change.
Drawing upon her experience as a former small-town reporter, Davenport also emphasized the importance of connecting environmental news and policy to individual lives in meaningful ways: “One thing I try to do is to get real people in my stories,” she said.
While Davenport does not explicitly advocate for particular policies, she reports on the general consensus of scientific experts, subsequent policy proposals, and questions of their political tenability. Despite the world’s deep political divides, she identified a current of hope for the future of climate change reporting — for her, the fact that climate change is now universally considered major news is a major achievement.
These interconnected, invisible deluges are beginning to show themselves. What we need is a coordinated and informed response to climate change as a global crisis, instead of isolated and insufficient attention for a handful of disasters. It will be up to the media and its consumers to demand this shift, and creative solutions are on the way — but there is no time to waste.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/EOSDIS Worldview // Jen Guyton // Jen Guyton