Media Reporting on Climate Change

Distinguishing ‘climate variability’ and ‘climate change’ has remained a very thin line to most communities and even to the knowledge managers. 

In an eight days workshop in Nairobi-Kenya, Wren Media a UK based organization, converged a team of 12 radio journalists from East Africa to have a simple and clear understanding of what climatic change is and how the people in Africa are adapting towards its effects.

 This workshop was to enable journalists from all over the East African continent to have an informed reporting on the subject matter. It came out clearly that most journalist have avoided reporting on this subject with a notion of it being either too scientific, a new concept or most media houses having  not built the capacity of the reporters on the subject plus much and more list of reasons.

But for many years in Africa now, we have had ‘climate variability’ in various instances and the people were able to cope up with it since they could predict on when it’s most likely to occur and for how long. These were caused by climate variability; but ‘climate change’ is when such disasters like drought, floods e.t.c  become more frequent , too prolonged and worst of it, extreme.

You have to note that climate change is not local to a given area where you reside, but it’s a global issue that is crosscutting and it impacts both on your social and development life. In areas next to mountains, hills or large water bodies like Lake Victoria; the area is most likely to have a certain micro-climate that may vary from time to time; this should never be mistaken for the global climate change effect.

It also came out clear that 60% - 65% of Kenya’s energy is hydropower based, a danger that is worth checking due to the residing water levels in most of our dams, rivers and other water sources. The Kenyan government having noticed this in advance, there is exploration of the geothermal power in Naivasha town alongside other clean energies likes wind and biogas to supplement it and also reduce the percentage of CO₂ released into the atmosphere by the fossil fuels.

In our next issues we shall be exploring how farmers in different regions are adapting to the effects of climate change and what one we need to understand about carbon market in Kenya.