"For journalists, REDD+ is a tricky story to cover for a number of reasons. 1. Forest statistics are often unreliable or out of date. Figures need to be carefully checked, compared to other statistics and analysed for their real significance. Sources also need to be assessed. 2. REDD+’s final shap
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e is unclear. For example, how it will function and be financed have not yet been agreed. 3. The wording of a forest agreement may be vague, open to interpretation or incomprehensible to your audience [...] 4. Forestry policies vary enormously around the world. Forestry specialists often disagree, for example, over how REDD+ schemes should be funded. 5. There are differences of interest between and within countries. Some governments may believe that a market approach to curbing deforestation will be most effective, while others argue in favour of state control over a natural resource. National governments may favour policies that indigenous peoples oppose, while social activists and logging companies may advocate completely different approaches. 6. Covering the negotiations is demanding. Very few people are directly engaged in the discussions. So it is difficult to obtain interviews that provide personal insight and quotes as well as accurate, up-to-date information on the progress of talks. 7. Talking to directly affected forest communities is difficult." (Page 6)
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"The ultimate solutions to climate change are workable, cost-effective technologies which permit society to improve living standards while limiting and adapting to changes in the climate. Yet scientific, engineering, and organizational solutions are not enough. Societies must be motivated and empowe
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red to adopt the needed changes. For that, the public must be able to interpret and respond to often bewildering scientific, technological, and economic information. Social psychologists are aware, through their painstaking scientific research, of the difficulties that individuals and groups have in processing and responding effectively to the information surrounding long-term and complex societal challenges. This guide powerfully details many of the biases and barriers to scientific communication and information processing. It offers a tool—in combination with rigorous science, innovative engineering, and effective policy design—to help our societies take the pivotal actions needed to respond with urgency and accuracy to one of the greatest challenges ever faced by humanity: global-scale, human-induced environmental threats, of which the most complex and far-reaching is climate change." (Abstract)
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"Global Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the Global Age sets out to better understand the media’s role in the circulation and communication of these global challenges to humanity as well as the conflicts and contentions that surround them. Concerned as we are with crises that transcend national bor
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ders, whether in terms of impact or intervention, this book seeks to move beyond narrow national frameworks and nationally focused methodologies. In today’s globalizing world, where crises can be transnational in scope and impact, involve supranational levels of governance and become communicated in real time via global media, so national frames of reference and earlier research preoccupations are being superseded. The study of global crisis reporting, necessarily, needs to be situated and theorized in the context of journalism practised in the global age. As we shall explore, contemporary news media occupy a key position in the public definition and elaboration of global crises and are often far more than just conduits for their wider public recognition. In exercising their symbolic and communicative power, the media today can variously exert pressure and influence on processes of public understanding and political response or, equally, serve to dissimulate and distance the nature of the threats that confront us and dampen down pressures for change. In such ways, global crises become variously constituted within the news media as much as communicated by them." (Page 2)
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"If it wasn't for the international conferences and reports on climate change, this issue would be practically absent from the regional media agenda. Its coverage does not even reach 1 percent of daily reports, as shown in a new study carried out by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation's Regional Program
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on Latin American Media and Democracy. Global News, an international media monitoring agency, collaborated in the study that compared the two largest ciruclation national newspapers in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela during a month. The main aspects discussed: the volumes published by the media, the main actors on the media agenda, how climate change is inserted in this context, the causes and effects of this phenomenon, the sources used, and the solutions proposed." (Page 2)
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"The media play an important role in stimulating discussion in developing countries. Yet journalists asked by Panos say that the media have a poor understanding of the climate change debate and express little interest in it. Public discussion of the policies and issues involved is urgently needed. T
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his means those engaged in climate change issues must give journalists what they need for a good story." (Page 1)
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