Today is Earth Day, but for the past week journalists have been covering climate change and allowing their articles to be reused worldwide.
It’s part of Covering Climate Now, a global initiative to help news media report on “the defining story of our time with the rigor and urgency it deserves”. More than 460 news organisations are participating, across 57 countries including New Zealand.
In one of his many pieces for the initiative, New Zealand Herald science reporter Jamie Morton asks how population growth could affect the climate. He asks “should we be having fewer children?”
Morton also reports that some New Zealand species found nowhere else in the world, will be especially vulnerable to climate change. It’s a finding from new research by University of Auckland marine ecologist Professor Mark Costello.
“Without reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally, climate change-driven extinctions will happen,” Costello said.
Newsroom’s environment editor David Williams reports how recent studies are revealing surprising changes in ice shelves in the Ross Sea region, a choke-point in ocean circulation.
“There are some large questions about how stable those ice shelves are.” NIWA ocean modeller Erik Behrens told him.
Stuff republished international stories for Covering Climate Now, including a mushroom burial suit, how therapists are tackling eco-anxiety, and a US geoengineering research project investigating the feasibility of dimming the sun.
However the outlet continued its usual climate coverage through The Forever Project, looking at Fonterra’s claims over its climate footprint, a New Zealand satellite to track cow burps, as well as featuring an essay by Marlborough Girls’ College Year 9 student Sophie Kole for Earth Day.
Covering Climate Now stories:
NZ Herald
Does ‘people power’ distract from corporate responsibility?
Does population size matter?
Is NZ getting forestry right?
Can eating greener make a difference to emissions?
How can we play our own part?
How do we decarbonise New Zealand’s energy sector?
Are we doing enough to prepare?
How do we shrink agriculture’s climate footprint?
Warming will hit endemic species hardest
Climate change, elitism, equity and why campaigners opposed Auckland’s regional fuel tax
Simon Wilson: Five myths about traffic and the climate
Newsroom
Into the abyss: Probing Antarctica’s waters raises questions, uncertainty
Dangerous heat, unequal consequences (via Public Integrity, Mother Jones, The Arizona Republic and Orlando Sentinel)
Now is our last best chance to confront the climate crisis (via Rolling Stone)
Stuff
Rivers can be climate change solutions, too (via Mongabay)
Mushroom burial suit creates life after death (via How Stuff Works)
Therapists are reckoning with eco-anxiety (via Earther)
‘I’m hopeful’: Jerome Foster, the 18-year-old helping to craft US climate policy (via The Guardian)