IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

• COP28 must therefore gain global agreement to the rapid phase-down in the demand for and supply of all fossil fuels.
• It is therefore also essential to rapidly phase down the demand for and supply of all fossil fuels.
• "Any serious strategy to address the challenge of climate change must include commitments to run down the use and supply of fossil fuels.
• They must be deployed as well as, not instead of, rapid reduction in fossil fuels use," said Ita Kettleborough, Director, Energy Transitions Commission.

• That’s a problem: it creates the potential for day-to-day issues related to climate change, like ongoing mitigation and adaptation efforts, to go unreported.
• These shortcomings are hugely worrying given what scientists say lies in store for South Africa in the coming years.
• It also leaves the impression that climate change is an issue for elites, politicians and activists, and not ordinary people.

‘Ignoring the end of the world’

• I also interviewed 42 people from government institutions, civil society and the corporate sector, as well as members of the media and climate change scientists.
• The majority of climate change-related stories I reviewed were about the release of scientific reports, or high-profile global meetings.
• This choice led South African political scientist Steven Friedman to declare: “Mainstream media ignore the end of the world”.

Foreign news dominates

• Another key finding of the study is that South Africa’s media have relied on news from foreign news networks in their reporting on the climate crisis.
• This dominance of foreign news reports creates the impression among audiences that climate change is not a local concern.

After the fact

• One example was extensive reporting on the disastrous floods in the KwaZulu-Natal province in April 2022, in which the media mentioned climate change as the cause.
• Reporting only after the fact of a disaster was not, they said, particularly helpful.
• They decried the fact that most articles on the climate crisis were published in online media and some were behind paywalls.

Recommendations

The findings of the study could be addressed in several ways. For instance, I propose an indaba (workshop) involving key stakeholders like the government, NGOs, scientists, policymakers and journalists to discuss the issue of climate change journalism and the overall communication of the crisis in South Africa. Academic institutions should also introduce courses on climate change journalism and communication.

• But when an extreme weather event hits, how certain can we be that it was made more likely by climate change?
• In this episode, we’re delving into one of the major shifts in the public communication of climate change – the attribution of extreme weather events to climate change.
• Although in the past we knew climate change was making extreme weather more likely, advances in climate modelling now allow scientists to pinpoint the influence of natural and human-caused factors on individual weather extremes.
• Fear and Wonder is sponsored by the Climate Council, an independent, evidence-based organisation working on climate science, impacts and solutions.

• KCC is pleased to announce the release of complete stochastic climate-conditioned catalogs for the weather-related perils most impacted by climate changehurricanes, floods, and wildfires.
• Last year, the IPCC released its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), said Dr. Daniel Ward, KCC Director, Model Development.
• Apart from projected future losses, the KCC Reference Models incorporate the impacts of climate change to date on current losses.
• The KCC climate conditioned catalogs are available on the RiskInsight open loss modeling platform or via KCCs comprehensive consulting services.