The debate at the Cross-Border Forum on Environmental Jusice and Disinformation: IMAGINE INSPIRE IGNATE opened with Ivana Živković from Klimatski portal addressing how a solution oriented journalist handles the tensions between local communities, scientists, investors and policymakers.

Journalism is becoming increasingly more difficult because getting to the facts is getting harder. Klimatski portal sees their mission in empowering people and investigating politics. They focus on reporting on local struggles deriving from community and people, empower the work they have done, their narratives, and then continue to amplify that exact work. And in some cases they actually do succeed – just as in the case of a chicken mega-farm that was planned in Sisak, where with a combined power of people, community, and dedicated journalists, they managed to stop the project. To create a ripple effect, so it’s not a single success story and to keep the momentum of successful stories going, they developed a Manual for climate journalism for local communities to use when communicating about the topic of climate change and environmental protection and when working with the media.

Disinformation is not a new phenomenon. The tactic on how climate data is processed and communicated has its origins in the tobacco industry. The narrative of the fossil industry continuously adapted from the 70s onwards to the current state of things. Today, they cannot claim anymore that climate change isn’t true or real, so the tactic is to delay climate action, dominating the climate change narrative and information production.

Only an informed society is resilient to disinformation, and our society is not informed, and our institutions are not independent. The media is financially cripled everywhere, and public and political discourse is not fact-based. Klimatski portal fights the production of disinformation with solution journalism, a methodology made to identify problems, develop and present solutions, and ground every step in factual data.

Even if the narrative of the industry is that we can wait and that it’s not that bad, the factual reality is alarming. The Adriatic sea is part of the Mediterranean, the fastest warming region in the world. The warming of the deep Adriatic sea is alarming, given that today, we are at temperatures that scientists were expecting at the end of the century. The warming of the Mediterranean brings in invasive species, the most invasive one being the lionfish. These are the facts, which bring us to the real question – what is the solution? How do we deal with it?

The system is slow in coming up with the answers. Solution based journalism focuses on just that – seeking out the solutions. In the case of the lionfish, it’s an invasive species that is not recognized as such by the EU, but it presents a real problem for local communities and fishermen. They need solutions because it affects their daily lives and livelihood. But what is the solution? We can overfish lionfish (like Cyprus) or introduce it to the culinary world (like Greece), or we can go beyond that and stop overfishing their natural predators, such as octopuses.

Even if this fish species is not on the EU invasive species list, meaning we are not obliged to do something about it, we must act to answer the needs of the people. That is the difference between industry-produced information and an industry-influenced response, vs. solution-oriented information and a response focused on the people it affects. That is the power of the community.

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Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.