How to make climate stories impossible to ignore | Katherine Dunn

Summary

Summary of "How to Make Climate Stories Impossible to Ignore | Katherine Dunn"

Podcast Information:

• Title: TED Talks Daily
• Host/Author: TED
• Description: TED Talks Daily delivers the latest TED and TEDx talks in audio format, covering a vast array of subjects from Artificial Intelligence to Zoology, presented by the world's leading thinkers and doers.
• Episode: How to Make Climate Stories Impossible to Ignore | Katherine Dunn
• Release Date: May 19, 2025

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Introduction

In the episode titled "How to Make Climate Stories Impossible to Ignore," journalist and climate communicator Katherine Dunn explores the challenges and strategies involved in effectively communicating climate change to a broader audience. Delivered at TED Countdown's Dilemma event in Brussels in 2020, Dunn delves into the complexities of engaging the public with climate narratives that resonate and inspire action.

The Challenge of Climate Communication

Katherine Dunn opens with a candid confession about her own hesitance to engage with climate change headlines:

“I don't click on those stories, I don't read them.” ([04:06])

Despite being a journalist, she finds herself and likely many others overwhelmed and intimidated by the pervasive and often alarming climate narratives. This avoidance is not rooted in a lack of respect for the subject matter but rather in the emotional and cognitive burden these stories can impose.

The Impact of News Consumption

Dunn references research conducted at the Reuters Institute, highlighting that increased consumption of climate news correlates with a deeper understanding of its immediate and long-term effects. For example:

“When people could consume climate news weekly instead of monthly, they know things like climate change is affecting my health right now instead of in the future.” ([04:06])

This underscores the importance of consistent and relatable climate reporting in fostering a well-informed public.

Personal Journey and Professional Transition

Coming from Calgary, Alberta—a hub for the oil and gas industry—Dunn's initial foray into climate journalism involved covering the energy sector. However, the repetitive nature of climate stories led to professional burnout:

“It was a traumatic experience. So I left my job.” ([04:06])

This pivotal moment propelled her to join the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, a project dedicated to integrating climate perspectives across all journalistic disciplines rather than confining it to a single beat.

Strategies for Engaging Climate Stories

Dunn outlines several key strategies that journalists can employ to make climate stories more engaging and relatable:

1. Find Your "Mango"

Inspired by an Egyptian editor, the concept of "Find Your Mango" encourages journalists to connect climate change to locally significant elements that resonate with their audience's daily lives. Dunn provides diverse examples:

“For Diego, it's coffee; for me, it's skiing, durian, mushroom picking, football.” ([04:06])

By identifying what matters locally—be it sports, food, or cultural practices—journalists can anchor climate narratives in contexts that are meaningful and immediate to their readership.

2. Climate Coverage is Contagious

Integrating climate perspectives across various news sections can organically increase climate coverage. Dunn emphasizes that climate change is not isolated to environmental beats but intersects with economics, sports, culture, and more. She cites AFP's approach:

“AFP has a style guide that connects extreme weather events with climate change, helping journalists make relevant links.” ([04:06])

This method ensures that climate considerations are woven into the fabric of everyday news, enhancing visibility and relevance.

3. Be Proactive

Anticipating climate-related events and preparing coverage in advance allows journalists to move beyond reactive reporting. Dunn compares this proactive stance to covering major events like the Olympics or elections, suggesting that climate-related phenomena such as wildfires or extreme heat should similarly be anticipated and integrated into journalistic planning.

“We know the wildfires are coming… we have no excuse not to kind of prepare.” ([04:06])

By forecasting and planning for climate impacts, journalists can provide timely and actionable information to their audiences.

Illustrative Examples

Dunn highlights specific stories and series that embody effective climate journalism:

• "The Great Electrician Shortage" by David Owen (The New Yorker): This article links the energy transition to labor market dynamics, showcasing how climate action intersects with economic and personal career decisions.

• "Climate Heroes" (Irish Public Broadcaster RTE): A series of short, engaging videos that profile individuals making tangible differences in their communities, emphasizing agency and positive action.

“A lot of these stories, as simple as they seem, go back to something I was taught when I started journalism school: a story is someone doing something.” ([04:06])

These examples demonstrate how integrating climate narratives with human stories and practical implications can enhance engagement and relatability.

Overcoming the Boundaries of Success

Dunn addresses the often overwhelming scope of climate change, which can make journalists feel that only monumental stories signify success. She encourages focusing on providing useful, actionable information that aids individuals in making everyday decisions:

“Providing good, useful information can help people make really, really tangible, really important choices about their lives.” ([04:06])

By shifting the focus from the vastness of the problem to specific, manageable actions and decisions, journalists can foster a sense of agency and empowerment among their audience.

Conclusion

Katherine Dunn concludes with three actionable takeaways for journalists aiming to make climate stories impossible to ignore:

1. Connect Locally: Use relatable, local elements to anchor climate narratives.
2. Integrate Broadly: Embed climate coverage across all sections of news media.
3. Prepare Proactively: Anticipate and plan for climate-related events and stories.

These strategies collectively aim to make climate stories more engaging, relatable, and actionable, thereby enhancing public engagement and fostering a more informed and responsive society.

“When we look at those, these are places that we can start. We can start by remembering what's really important to the audience. We can be proactive and we can make connections.” ([04:06])

By implementing these approaches, Dunn envisions a media landscape where climate stories are seamlessly integrated and impossible to overlook, thereby driving meaningful awareness and action.

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Notable Quotes:

• “I don't click on those stories, I don't read them.” — Katherine Dunn ([04:06])
• “Providing good, useful information can help people make really, really tangible, really important choices about their lives.” — Katherine Dunn ([04:06])
• “When we look at those, these are places that we can start. We can start by remembering what's really important to the audience. We can be proactive and we can make connections.” — Katherine Dunn ([04:06])

Final Thoughts

Katherine Dunn's insightful talk provides a roadmap for journalists and communicators to reshape climate storytelling. By making climate stories relatable, integrating them into various facets of news media, and proactively addressing impending climate events, Dunn advocates for a more engaged and informed public discourse on climate change.

Transcript

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You're listening to Ted Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Headlines about climate change sometimes scare the crap out of me, and honestly, I don't always want to open them. I know I'm not alone. So how do we get people to open these stories and learn about the crisis that has an impact on all of us? For journalist and climate communicator Katherine Dunn, this is one of the most important questions she faces in her work. In her 2024 talk, she shares the tools journalists are using to connect with audiences and make it harder for people to turn it's all about finding what affects people's lives locally. Or, as Catherine puts it, the answer to the question, what's your mango? Trust me, it's a brilliant question, but you'll have to listen to find out what it means.

[Katherine Dunn]

So I have a confession to make, and it's that for many of you, you'll know when the IPCC reports come out every year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change telling us where we are with climate change and where we're going. And there's this flood of headlines, right? You've probably all seen them often. I don't click on those stories, I don't read them. And I'm a journalist. So this is an embarrassing thing to admit. And it's not because I don't think this work is amazing or I don't think the IPCC is amazing. I really, really do. But I also know why I'm not clicking on those stories, right? And I think it's probably for reasons a lot of people don't click on them. They scare the crap out of me sometimes when you work on this stuff all the time, you think, well, we're screwed. Tell me something else I don't know, right? Or it can be technical, it can be overwhelming. People feel like they have so much on their plate. Why are they going to look at these stories? So that's a challenge. It's a challenge for journalists, but it's also a challenge for all of us because I think the more that we know about climate change, the more that we read climate change or consume climate change news, the more that we know about climate change. So I work at the Reuters Institute and our researchers saw in eight countries when people could consume climate news weekly instead of monthly. They know things like climate change is affecting my health right now instead of in the future. Or rich, more polluting countries bear more responsibility for climate change than the poor ones who did less to cause it. But we know that the more they consume climate change news, the more that they actually know. So I'm from Calgary, Alberta. It's an oil and gas city. I'm from an oil and gas family and I got into covering climate change because I covered the energy industry, I covered the big oil and gas companies. And when I was covering climate change, I could see that I was having the same problem, right? I could see that people weren't clicking or reading my stories. Sometimes as a journalist, you see behind the veil of what people are clicking on. It's a very traumatic experience. So I left my job. It was so traumatic, I left my job. And in 2022, I joined a new project called the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, which is at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford University. And it was set up by our co founders with this idea that climate is really, you know, it's a lens, it's not an angle, it's not a beat. It's something that goes across everything. And that's how we as journalists should cover it. So every six months, we get 100 journalists in kind of a virtual room. They come from 50 to 60 countries and they come from all different positions in the newsroom. You know, they're editor in chiefs and people in economics, finance, sports, culture, as well as loads of climate experts. And we get them in a room. And over the course of six months, we look at climate from loads of different angles. We look at it from the science, the finance, but also we look at culture, we look at sports. And this kind of helps people on all these different desks question their assumptions. So that's kind of a brilliant approach. So, okay, first of all, it's not just me who does this work, right? There's a team of us. There's my boss, Mitali Mukherjee, there's my colleague Diego Ortiz and Greg Cochran. And now three years in, we're at 600 journalists. And we kind of often say when we started out, we were pretty honest, that we just had questions about this kind of stuff, right? We didn't really have that many answers. And now three years in, we're going into our fourth year. We have a few places that we like to start, and many of you aren't journalists, but you can probably use this in your own lives, in your own industries. So one place we start is called Find you'd Mango. So this comes from an Egyptian editor called Suzy, and we had a discussion about why weren't the mangoes as good in Egypt this year? Why weren't they as tasty? It was climate change, of course. And then we went around the room and we looked at what's the mango in your country? So Diego's Costa Rican. It's coffee for him. Where I'm from, it's skiing, it's durian, it's mushroom picking, it's football. And a lot of the world. And a lot of the world, it's mangoes as well. But it's all these things that kind of connect us to climate. And we often talk about lives and livelihoods. These things are so important. But it's also sports, food, culture, the things that really make our lives worth living and the things that are really important to us. The second thing is that climate coverage is contagious. And once you start looking for climate coverage in your newsroom, you can find it all kinds of different places. So sometimes people come to Diego and I and they say, we're going to start a climate desk, or should we hire reporters, or what should we do? And we say, okay. A lot of what other newsrooms have done, a lot of the time is they've taken an inventory and they look at what they're already doing, and often there's way more than you would expect. So local reporters, you know, they're covering water issues, they're covering city hall questions. You know, business reporters are covering energy prices, they're covering insurance. Sports reporters are covering, like, when it is too hot to have, you know, a kid's little league game, this kind of thing. And actually journalists are doing this. So one great example is afp, where they have a style guide that connects extreme weather events with when they can connect it to climate change, what's the link that they can make, which is something a lot of journalists are grappling with. And Yvonne Kuron, who is in charge of the climate strategy at AFP and is one of our members, he's also in charge of bringing climate training to everybody in afp. And this is something a lot of newsrooms are doing. And what they've realized is it's not always about the big climate story, right? It's often about taking these stories, adding a little bit of context, a line, a paragraph. It's all about connecting the dots, giving the Readers and the audience, that context. So the third thing we suggest is be proactive. A lot of climate coverage, it used to be the science reporters were sitting over here, they knew what was going on, they had this very difficult job. And then every time there was a climate disaster, it was over here. Bang, bang, bang, reacting, react, react, right? And we weren't often making this connection. But the world has changed and we know this stuff is coming. So I'm Canadian. We know the wildfires are coming, right? Most of the world, we know the extreme heat is coming every single year. And if we know stuff is coming, we have no excuse not to kind of prepare. And not just in the really long term, but like, you know, for next month or next summer. And this is also something newsrooms are doing and we often compare it to like the Olympics or the election. So in the Indian elections earlier this year, you know, extreme heat was a huge, huge, huge factor for the people in the polling booths, but also for the journalists who were covering it, who are often getting heat stroke. But it was also an issue in Paris this summer. What does it mean if it's 40 degrees in Paris, which is super likely? What does it mean for the athletes? What does it mean for the crowds? So when I say this, I often like to mention a couple stories that I really love. One of them is a story called the Great Electrician Shortage by David Owen at the New Yorker. And it's a story about how, you know, in the energy transition, we need to electrify everything, right? So we need loads of electricians. And it's a story about the energy transition and climate change, but it's also a story about job choices and the labor market and what people should do with their lives and what you should study at university. And another thing I like to mention is a little series called Climate Heroes, which is at the Irish public broadcaster RTE under a lovely guy called Philip Bromwell, who's also an alumni of ours. And they're these little social first videos, very, very short. And they're about people doing stuff in their communities. So they're about a climate comedian going on the road. They're about a professional rugby player turned climate activist. There's loads of biodiversity stories, there's loads of stories about businesses changing how they deal with waste. And they're like very easy to binge and they make you feel good. And the question there is not really about should we not do the big hard hitting stuff, should we not cover the ipcc? It's like, this is so big now we should do both, right? And a lot of these stories, as simple as they seem, they go back to something that I was taught when I started journalism school, which is that one of my first professors would have us write on the top of the paper. He'd say a story is someone doing something? Because someone needs to be doing something. There needs to be agency. Something needs to be happening. So when I say all of this, it sounds super simple and like, oh, it's so easy. And obviously in a lot of this work, it can feel like the boundary for success is so high. It's stopping climate change, right? So anything short of that can feel like a failure. And I think that's something that climate journalists are grappling with every day, like, what that feels like. But just because the boundary is so high, you know, for journalists, when we're looking at what's our role here? And it's providing good, useful information can help people make really, really tangible, really important choices about their lives, right? About is it safe to go to the park today with their kids? Is it too hot? You know, what should they do with their careers? What does the future kind of hold? These are really tangible decisions. So I think when we look at those, these are places that we can start. We can start by remembering what's really important to the audience. We can be proactive and we can make connections. And these are things that I hope will kind of help connect with audiences and make it a little bit harder for people to look away. So thanks so much.

[Elise Hu]

That was Katherine Dunn at TED Countdown's Dilemma event in Brussels in 2020. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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