It was one of the toughest media training workshops I had conducted. Usually, I work with journalist colleagues who cover environmental issues, definitely including climate change. There we conduct media workshops on specific issues on which the journalists want more information or better understanding – What is happening to water flows in transboundary rivers as a result of climate change? How is it affecting agriculture? How can journalists incorporate valuation of natural resources into their reports and still be understood by the lay audience and so on. But here, I was working with colleagues in community radio stations, who no doubt were regularly reporting on environmental issues but without any theoretical underpinning, and who were broadcasting to an audience that consisted mostly of marginal farmers in one of the poorest regions of India.

Under the Shubh Kal campaign, we trained journalists from four community radio stations – Radio Bundelkhand, Lalit Lokvaani, Radio Dhadkan and Chanderi Ki Awaaz in October-November 2012. All the radio stations are in Bundelkhand – the semi-arid region in Central India that has faced nine drought years out of the last 12. Community radio reporters have been trained to act as links between the community, local policymakers and local experts. After going through the training workshops, the reporters went back to their areas and attempted making first drafts of radio programmes on climate change. So the journalists first went around villages asking farmers what in their opinion was causing climate change. In almost every case, the answer they got was deforestation. While that is undoubtedly correct, not a single villager interviewed mentioned the principal cause – overuse of fossil fuels. Then the journalists went to the experts and the policymakers. There they did get some of the main causes of global warming – including fossil fuel overuse and deforestation – but they also got some wrong information. Some of the scientists listed air pollutants such as sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide as greenhouse gases, while others mixed up global warming with ozone layer depletion. We had to hold a two-day review of all the early drafts, point out where the mistakes were occurring, and decide that the anchors would make the corrections in their commentaries.

In contrast, there were some excellent interviews when it came to the effects of climate change on farming, water supply, fodder and fuel wood availability and so on. Farmers, scientists, policymakers, all had to deal with these effects regularly, and so they knew exactly what they were talking about. And they were also quite clear on adaptation techniques. A scientist from an agricultural research extension centre spoke about the way a newly developed soybean variety that ripened in 80 days instead of 100 had enabled farmers to get their harvest in the autumn of 2012 before the crop was hit by water scarcity. Another talked of a vaccination programme that immunised goats against a disease to which they were becoming prone – all very useful information, much of it very specific for the audiences of these community radio stations.

Many of these effects – crop failures, increased water scarcity, domestic animals facing new diseases – are spread over the villages, which makes them less visible to many media houses. There is an urgent need to get this information out to everyone, firstly to bring home the gravity of the situation and secondly to inform people about the viable solutions. The first step in this process is to improve the knowledge and understanding of the many journalists who live and work at the grassroots level, and who report regularly on climate change effects without being able to make the connection with climate change. That is why we are very glad that we have taken up this challenge. q