Living Through the Climate Emergency

The document encourages newsrooms to expand climate reporting beyond science desks into business, politics, health, and social justice. It emphasizes that the climate crisis disproportionately affects poor people and people of color and argues that reporting must include actionable solutions to avoid a sense of inevitable doom. The guide provides specific inquiry prompts across eleven sectors, including health, food, housing, and migration, to help journalists visualize a greener future and hold powerful entities accountable.

• Climate change impacts are distributed unequally, typically hitting "the poor and people of color hardest", who are the groups that contributed the least to the crisis.
• Public health is severely impacted by the climate emergency, with research from Harvard and Oxford universities indicating that "Roughly one in every five deaths globally is caused by the burning of fossil fuels".
• The climate crisis is destabilizing the housing market by making it "much more difficult to obtain and afford insurance" in areas threatened by rising seas or wildfires, which can render a household's primary wealth "all but worthless".
• Climate disasters are already causing migration both within national borders and across them, leading to the emergence of "climate refugees" and increasing pressure on immigration debates in wealthy nations.
• Fossil fuel companies were aware as early as the 1970s that their products posed a threat to humanity, but executives "chose to lie about that to the public and policymakers".
• To prevent audience despair, journalists should highlight that "most of the solutions needed to reign in emissions and reverse damage to the planet already exist", and the primary challenge is the scale and speed of their implementation.

APA

CCNow (2023). Living Through the Climate Emergency. Covering Climate Now. https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/living-through-the-climate-emergency/

Chicago

CCNow. Living Through the Climate Emergency. Covering Climate Now, 2023. https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/living-through-the-climate-emergency/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=CCNow |title=Living Through the Climate Emergency |publisher=Covering Climate Now |date=8 March 2023 |url=https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/living-through-the-climate-emergency/ |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{ccnow2023living, author = {CCNow}, title = {{Living Through the Climate Emergency}}, institution = {Covering Climate Now}, year = {2023}, month = mar, url = {https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/living-through-the-climate-emergency/}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }