Stuff published the first edition of its climate change initiative The Forever Project in late March - the very day we went into lockdown. Understandably, it didn't make much impact but this week it’s back with a supplement in the papers pushing the message that post-COVID recovery must have climate and sustainability at ts heart. Mediawatch asks the editor if its an uphill battle they can't win when the imperative to fire up the economy up quick as possible is so great.
Eloise Gibson, climate change editor at Stuff Photo: STUFF NZ LTD
Michael Baker is a professor of public health at the University of Otago - one of the familiar faces and voices in the media during the crisis.
Last Wednesday he was interviewed by international science magazine New Scientist
It concluded by noting Porf Baker hopes the COVID-19 response here will inspire more ambitious action on climate change and biodiversity loss.
It’s not a new hope - a month ago he said this appearing on US-based global TV news show Democracy Now:
AUDIO: 28 Jun 2020 FOREVER 01 Baker
“One of my big lessons from all of this is that we have to be looking to the future at the kind of threats that you could describe as existential threats for humanity. And with a pandemic, we have, I think, failed quite badly at a global level to anticipate something that was very well described, with very good science, that was only a short distance ahead of us. It was almost in front of us. It was just a few weeks to a month or two away. And the world has really failed, I think, to assess that risk, listen to science and act in a coordinated way. And that’s why I feel very concerned, and I really hope that we’ll learn from this, this pandemic. It’s obviously not over yet. But it will be a temporary shock. It will be a horrible shock, and it’s going to potentially cause many millions of deaths across the planet. But after, you know, maybe two or three years, it will hopefully be under control in various ways.
But what it — the big lesson for me is that the far more severe threats on the horizon are about climate change and loss of biodiversity. And while those threats are going to increase and intensify over the next few years to the next few decades, they will be far more severe for humanity than the pandemic. And that’s why I really hope that we will take the lesson from this event and apply it to these other threats. So, that means listening to scientists, strengthening our global health agencies, like World Health Organization and U.N., and really taking a coordinated global response to these events. And so that’s my huge hope from this very destructive pandemic that we’re in at the moment.
He’s not the only one trying to put that message across.
Earlier this year news publisher Stuff appointed its first ever climate change editor - Eloise Gibson - and launched the Forever Project.
It promised “clear-eyed, insistent coverage of the epoch-defining challenges of climate change and sustainability.”
It marked the launch with a magazine supplement in all its metropolitan papers on the 25th of March -
But it was another peril we were all focused on back then - it was the day we went into level four lockdown
Last Wednesday, another FP supplement appeared in the likes of the Press, The Dominion Post and the Waikato Times - today it’s also in the SST.
I asked editor Eloise Gibson - how has COVID-9 changed the mission:
AUDIO: INTERVIEW ex CTRL C AK 10am.
b/anno: Eloise Gibson - climate change editor at Stuff - and editor of the Forever Project climate change intiative. The second of th pojects quarterly magazine supplements appears today in tye SST - and if your reade of the waikato Times, he Donm Post, the Press - and other STuff papers - you may have seen it in your edition of the papr last wednesday.
It;s all online as well in the environment section of the Stuff website.
