‘Reporting the Climate is Wider Than Disasters, Environment and Science’

BANGKOK | 9 September 2026

(Insights on climate reporting and a world in disorder at the ‘Telling the Climate Story’ workshop, August 2026. Updated after the event.)

Let me start with a confession. I had some mixed feelings about holding this workshop, although we really wanted a face-to-face event – and it’s really different to connect with everyone for real.

That’s because, I thought, we’re adding more carbon into the air from your flights. In preparing the slides for this workshop, I also read that tall buildings with glass facades (like this hotel perhaps) actually let warmer air out, throwing heat out there into an already an unusually hot world – and one that’s currently an extremely humid one too. The heat during the current rainy season in Bangkok has been a moist, heavy blanket that sticks to you like a leech.

But all of these also show that the climate crisis has seeped into our daily psyches. We have actually seen our planet change, deteriorate within our lifetimes, even within our professional lives.

In the 90s, we used to report about “climate change” – no one called it a crisis or collapse or breakdown then — in an international news agency (Inter Press Service) that focused on the news the mainstream media did not often cover or under-reported.  At that time, my peers from other news outlets would say ‘oh stuff like that is for you guys’ – because it was not in the main news radar. It was seen as something for advocates or civil society or the ‘noise makers’ around issues like globalization (remember those days?) or environmental topics like how much water golf courses gobble up.

But what I used to report about has become what I experience, and the biggest running story today.

A WORLD IN DISORDER

The climate is everywhere in a world in disorder. The state of the world shows us why the climate is an arc that goes way beyond extreme events and disasters, and is related to geopolitics and history, profit and power, the shift to a more multi-polar architecture, narratives in the press and how peoples are often ahead of their governments.

I’ll try to connect just a few dots that show the climate in the wars in our midst, as part of this reorganization of the world, and relate our discussion to things outside this room.

There are the obvious ones, like the US coveting the oil of countries that are not in its orbit. This particular US government sees the world as a place for conquest. Beyond walking away from the Paris Agreement and other international commitments, it has designs on Greenland and has cancelled previously approved projects for wind energy. With an eye on profits, the US has been pressing its friends to buy more and more gas from it.

We all saw what the US did in Venezuela, and it now manages the country’s oil and has taken some of it back to its shores. Venezuela asks permission from the US to use its own funds. Iraq, decades after the US destroyed the country, still needs to get an okay from Washington to use its own funds. Its oil revenues go to the Federal Reserve Bank New York and run from there, US news reports say.

Part of the designs on Israel-occupied Gaza and Lebanon are their energy and natural resources. 

War, the use of weapons and missiles, explosions – all these release more carbon into the air, on top of the fires we are seeing in Europe, for instance. Yet military emissions are mostly not included in states’ reporting of greenhouse gases. 

To add to all that, unnecessary wars have led not only to an energy crisis but a situation where already expensive fuel, like jet fuel, is being spent to kill even more people. 

But it is one good thing if this fuel shortage means more problems for the US military, which has been having supply challenges with weaponry in West Asia, including missile interceptors and other armaments (described in many podcasts and discussions) whose production needs rare earth elements from China – that have been scarce.

FURTHER DECLINE OF FOSSIL FUELS

If we zoom out, perhaps we can look at these messy convulsions as things that come not only with a shift to what some call a post-US world, but the further decline of fossil fuels as currency – of the economy, of wars. 

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Much of the US’ behaviour in foreign policy, including in climate action, looks like holding on to the past even as it supports the fossil-fuel heavy AI bubble as the future. Earlier in August, the US threatened countries that do business with Iran. Will our countries exercise their sovereignty? 

Despite the energy crunch, much of the world is moving and seeing the world as it is today – a world where one out of four, five new cars is electric, where renewables are spreading like wildfire and where the talk is about moving from petrostates to electrostates. 

Viewed across history, the fuel of the day used to be coal, and then oil, and now, the story moves on. Maybe solar and wind will be the equalizer. After all, what is there to invade and steal if everyone has the sun and the wind?

FAR FROM A SIDEBAR STORY

In all ways in our already stressed planet, the climate crisis is not a sidebar story. It needs to be freed from the limiting default news angles of disaster and the environment, and science.

The climate is like the atmosphere that makes life possible and encircles the Earth, supported by gravity. In news, I argue that the climate is wider and bigger than the environment beat, and that news outlets need to change that slug and that heading on their pages and sites.

We know how to fix the climate crisis, but this will not happen on its own. We also know, and need to say it in what we report, that we need to do this faster, including in Southeast Asia. 

A CHRONIC ILLNESS?

The climate crisis is like a systemic problem, but one that is still reversible, going by what the science tells us. It’s a bit like a person whose body is slowly and steadily getting out of homeostasis, no longer in equilibrium. Metabolic dysfunction, say elevated insulin and insulin resistance or a damaged gut microbiome, can show up across organs and health markers. A lifestyle change, which often includes food, can help address this but shifting habits is not always easy – and there is still tomorrow.

Until there is not. At some point, this can become a chronic condition or illness, one that makes the person more vulnerable to bugs and illnesses. It can overload that person’s carrying capacity. 

OFF THE PRESS | Reporting the Climate: A (Doable) Tip Sheet

Like the human body, the planet, which is a self-regulating system of life, has tipping points too. The climate-related events and disasters we see are signs of a systemic dysfunction, a dysfunction of the planet’s operating system, if you will.

HUMAN SUFFERING

Whether we are in a 1.3C, 1.4C world, or heading up to 1.5C or more, the point is that an overheated planet is causing human suffering. 

This ‘Telling the Climate Story’ workshop is thus about widening the aperture of our curiosity and our news lens, a space for cross-fertilization. Experts and journalists may be different species, but the scientific, advocacy and journalistic methods share the discipline of rigour and being clear-eyed. We also share overlapping spaces in the climate conversation.

As journalists, part of doing our bit for human survival and evolution is digging deeper and more skillfully into this story. The climate story is one that we are in too – and there is no walking away from it.

*Johanna Son is the editor and founder of the Reporting ASEAN series. 

(Lead visual: Warming stripes from #ShowYourStripes, created by Ed Hawking, University of Reading)