KLIMAPRESS – Climate journalism under pressure

• Erika Bjerström is one of Sweden's most experienced foreign correspondents, with climate, geo-politics and democracy as key expert areas. Between 2019-2024 she was the first global climate correspondent at SVT, National Swedish Television reported and before that staffed senior correspondent SVT's based in EU, Africa and USA. She is also an author, and her latest book ”Democracy Dies in the Heat” will be published in September 2025
• Syed Muhammad Saqib is a climate journalism educator and researcher from Pakistan. He has a PhD in Climate Journalism, and is an Assistant Professor at Forman Christian College University, with published research and extensive training experience on climate communication, climate journalism education, and youth climate activism. He is a member of the MediaClimate Network and collaborator on climate literacy initiatives with academic and development sector partners.
• Hansigne Broberg is a trained journalist with a master's degree in social science. She teaches at Ilisimatusarfik / University of Greenland, and at Klimapress she will talk about how climate change affects everyday life in Greenland, where nature and hunting play a central role – and how the media covers (or fails to cover) these changes.
• M. Fatih Çömlekçi is an associate professor of media and communication studies at Kırklareli University, Turkey. His work examines journalism’s role in socio-political transformation, with a focus on environmental and climate communication in authoritarian and polarized contexts. At Klimapress, he will talk about findings from his two-year fieldwork with 21 climate journalists across Turkey, revealing how advocacy-driven climate journalism unfolds amid political repression, economic precarity, and mainstream media neglect. His article, "Covering Environment and Climate Change in Turkey: Transformative Journalisms Face Competitive Authoritarianism (2025)" was recently published in Journalism Studies.
• Lamis Issa has worked with the freedom of expression organization Article 19’s Middle East and Nort Africa (MENA) office for 7 years, focusing on transparency issues. She is coordinating a program on climate journalism, bringing together journalists, scientists and activists in Lebanon, Algeria, Libya, Marocco and Tunisia. Lamis has background in political science, and long-term experience in working with human rights and transparency advocacy. She is currently working on a PhD, exploring questions of advancing the right to information across the MENA region.
• Marie Sæhl is a journalist at Dagbladet Information, where she writes about climate, environment, and biodiversity. She is a trained journalist from the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus and from Politiken, and has previously worked as a climate journalist at DR. She also serves on the jury for the Nordic Prize in Environmental and Climate Journalism.
• Hanna Nikkanen is an environmental journalist and co-founder of Finland's award-winning long-form publication Long Play. Author of several books and of "Hyvän sään aikana", a collaborative climate journalism book she directed and co-authored with 21 journalism students.
• Atle Andersson is a climate and environmental journalist at Bergens Tidende, the largest regional newspaper outside of Oslo. He has covered climate, environmental, and nature issues for 25 years. He has won several awards and recognitions for his coverage of climate issues. Andersson has, among other things, conducted investigative journalism on Norwegian climate financing abroad. Today, he primarily works on regional and local climate and nature issues in Western Norway.
• Torsten Schäfer is a professor at Darmstadt's University of Applied Science. He teaches writing and investigation as well as storytelling with a focus on climate journalism, ethics of sustainability and indigenous perspectives. He works as a nature writer as well as an environmental journalist for national newspapers in Germany. In the project "Talking salmon", Schäfer explores how migratory fish species can help to tell relational stories that connect land and sea and bridge the gap between humanity and nature.
• Sobhika Vasanthan is a Master’s student in Journalism, Media and Globalisation at Aarhus University and the University of Amsterdam, specialising in Politics & Communication. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and Media Studies with a Literature minor from FLAME University, Pune, India. Drawing on her background in cultural journalism and work with underrepresented communities in India, she explores how climate change reporting can bridge global narratives with local realities. She is particularly interested in emotionally present, collaborative storytelling that connects climate impacts to culture, identity, and daily life.
• Roberta Cojocaru is a Master’s student in Journalism, Media and Globalisation at Aarhus University and City St. George’s, University of London. She did her Bachelor’s degree in communication science at Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich and has dealt with climate related topics from an academic as well as journalistic point of view. Combining both – the researcher’s and journalist’s – perspectives she will talk about literary journalism as a tool to report on nature and why it is important to “get out there“.
• Violette Cantin is pursuing a master's degree in Journalism, Media and Globalisation at Aarhus University and City St George's, University of London. She has been working for two years as a reporter on national television and national radio for Radio-Canada, the French-language Canadian public broadcaster. She has reported from over five countries both in Europe and North America and has won the EU-Canada Young Journalist Fellowship.
• Tarjei Leer-Salvesen spent six months at Reuters Institute in Oxford i 2023 to write about cross-border use of the worlds different RTI laws. He is also interested in environmental information and GDPR as a tool for journalism. In Norway, he is a freelance investigative journalist while also maintaining Innsyn.no, the RTI-tool for Norwegian 690 archives, hosted by the fact-checker organisation Faktisk.no. His textbook on RTI used as a journalistic tool features a chapter on environmental information. He has used this in reporting on both local, national and international stories.
• Katherine Dunn is the Content Editor at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, which has worked with more than 800 journalists in 122 countries since 2022 to improve climate literacy and storytelling across newsrooms. The OCJN also works with newsroom leaders on climate strategy, produces yearly research on climate and audiences in eight countries around the world, and this year, helped support the first ever study on the impact of covering climate change on journalists' mental health. Katherine has also worked with the EBU for their 2023 report on climate strategy in newsrooms, and in 2023 gave a TED talk on climate journalism. She is Canadian and lives in London.
• Hans Cosson-Eide is head of the climate change and technology team at NRK News, Norway. He joined the Norwegian public broadcaster in 2016, and has since covered a range of topics, including climate change, politics, and breaking news. He has been part of the NRK climate news team since its beginning in 2020. His background is from political science, which he studied at School of Oriental and Aftican Studies and the London School of Economics in the UK.
• Astrid Rommetveit is head of the climate and investigations team at NRK, and was the project leader for making NRKs climate desk back in 2020. She has been covering climate and environmental stories for almost 25 years and has received the EMS Journalistic award for her climate stories. Her early climate stories focused heavily on natural science, but in recent years her journalism has taken on a broader perspective. Astrid holds a master’s degree in political science and media studies (and is now doing studies in investigative journalism and climate).
• Mohammad Ashraful Huda is a visual storyteller, an educator, and also oversees the academic programme at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His work focuses on storytelling through images and motion, with an emphasis on narrating stories of human life, cultural identity, and the environment.
• Sagar Chhetri is a photographer and educator based in Kathmandu, Nepal, and currently serves as Head of Learning Programs at photo.circle. His practice explores photography as a tool for civic engagement and collaborative political expression. He is a co-author of the chapter Reflections on Doing Visual Politics in Democracy as Creative Action.
• Henrik Vold is an Associate Director with the Norwegian Institute of Journalism in Oslo. He trains and advises newsrooms in new working methodologies, and has applied artificial intelligence and disinformation as areas of expertise.  
• Agnes Walton is an award-winning investigative and news journalist, documentary filmmaker and environmental scientist. She currently teaches climate journalism at the Norwegian Institute for Journalism and has been a Senior Video Journalist for New York Times Opinion, a documentary film and news producer for VICE News Tonight on HBO, and was the host of environmental true crime podcast The Crisis. She has won two Emmy awards and has a masters in environmental science from Yale University.
• Sofie Mohanty Hviid is a member of the Danish climate journalism organization Klimajournalisterne. She specializes in behavioural psychology and focuses on how climate journalism can engage wider audiences. Together with her colleagues, she initiated the creation of a Danish network for climate journalists working in the local and national media. Sofie is also a co-host of the podcast Det vi burde tale om, where, alongside her co-hosts, she cuts through misinformation and explains the most pressing climate stories in a clear and relatable way. 
• Malene Emilie Rustad is a journalist at E24, Norways biggest financial newspaper, where she writes about energy and climate related topics. She has a master's degree in journalism from Oslo Met, and experience from newspaper VG and climate ngo EAT. She follows polluting industries/companies, money and politics, and loves to break greenwashing and lobby against climate change.
• Ine Schwebs is a journalist with Panorama nyheter, a specialised news outlet on aid, development and foreign affairs. She has experience from NRK and most recently VG, where she wrote extensively about climate change. Ine also has a MA in journalism from OsloMet and a BA in journalism and international relations from Kingston University.
• Alexandra Urisman Otto is a climate reporter at Dagens Nyheter. She was awarded Climate Journalist of the Year in 2021 and is one of the contributors to "The Climate Book" (2022), described as an "essential guide to a better world". 
  
  Lisa Röstlund is an investigative reporter at Aftonbladet. She's been awarded the national prize for investigative journalism, Guldspaden, for her book "Skogslandet" (2022), which scrutinises Swedish forestry. Her most recent book, "The Norwegian Paradox" (2025), is about the Norwegian oil industry. 
  
  Together they have authored a handbook of climate journalism, published in March 2025, called "Letting the world know" ("Att låta världen få veta"). Here they share the basic knowledge and starting points that every journalist now must have – gathered in the book with the help of fellow journalists and researchers from all over the world. 
• Anja Lauvdal, freeform pianist and electronic musician, has an inimitable ability to conjure multiple sonic moods, reflecting on the fragility of the natural world while exhibiting a positive stillness. She's an established force on the Norwegian scene, with her playful and textural playing running the All Ears festival and collaborating with Jenny Hval, Hamid Drake and William Parker, among others. ‘From A Story Now Lost,’ marked her first solo album. The album was produced by Berlin-based electronic musician Laurel Halo. In July she released ‘Farewell to Faraway Friends’, a collection of improvisations on Wurlitzer. She will perform during the prize seremoni Thursday night.

Thursday

Climate and artificial intelligence: "AI tools which improve your climate journalism", with Henrik Brattli Vold, IJ

Generative and agentic AI can strengthen your climate reporting, and this session will teach you an efficient method for expanding and developing your hypothesis, as well as ways of exploring and investigating large datasets with basic access to a chatbot. You will also learn about content windows, and how you fill them efficiently with relevant information with the help of agentic AI. (To get the most out of this session, you need a paid subscription to one of the large chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini etc)).  

Breaking Climate: "How to break climate news” with Ine Schwebs, Panorama, and Malene Rustad, E24

A workshop on how to think and work to make climate related news. Including how to find climate breaking news when you have shifts at the breaking desk, and how to convince your boss to give you the time you need to report it, and to reach far.

Visual/multimedia climate journalism: "Sharing tools and learning from practice", with Agnes Walton, IJ, and photojournalists Sagar Chhetri from Photo.Circle, Nepal and Ashraf Huda from Pathshala, Bangladesh

How do you craft impactful visual portrayals of climate change? This workshop explores two approaches in photo and video: Capturing the complex relationship between climate and human life, and how to center landscapes and nature as subjects in their own right. 

Friday

"Cross border: How to succeed in cross border journalism on climate/ environmental issues?", with investigative reporter Tarjei Leer-Salvesen

Did you know there is a tool which can get around the protection of commercial secrets? Journalists have used it to access details on Russian bitcoin-mining near a NATO exercise, and to find information on privately owned salmon farms and overseas fracking operations. In this session you will learn about the Aarhus Convention. It can also be used when reporting on public sector plans and decision-making.

Accessing information through the Aarhus Convention or the Norwegian adaption of it (miljøinformasjonsloven) can be a really powerful tool. Or a cause for confusion and frustration. The beauty of this tool is not only that it can overrule secrecy of business interests, but also the vague or wide definitions of "environmental information". Come and learn how this can be done, and what arguments to use to open otherwise closed doors.

What do participants need to bring? Curiosity, and it helps if they can shape their curiosity into a journalistic hypothesis; something they want to investigate within the field of environmental information. The workshop is partly a presentation, and one part where we can discuss ideas in smaller groups.

"How to cover climate and environment in local news", with Atle Andersson, Bergens Tidende

This workshop in local climate journalism will be in Norwegian.

Lokal klima- og miljøjournalistikk: hvordan komme nær?
Klima- og miljøjournalistikk blir gjerne kritisert for å være fjern fra vanlige menneskers liv og hverdag. Men hvordan kan mediene gjøre sakene relevant for lesere der de bor og lever sine liv?

I denne workshopen vil journalist Atle Andersson i Bergens Tidende vise med eksempler hvordan avisen dekker og formidler historier og nyheter om klimaendringer og tap av natur. Hvilke type saker treffer leserne? Hvilke grep og valg har journalisten og redaksjonen gjort for å øke interessen for to av vår tids største utfordringer. Må man styre unna  alarmerende forskningsrapporter eller forenkle og polarisere for å få leserne på kroken? Presentasjonen vil legge opp til en diskusjon om mål, midler og metoder i dekningen av lokale og regionale klima- og miljøsaker.

"Human-nature relations in climate journalism: where to go?", with Sobihika Vasanthan, Roberta Cojocaru, Violette Cantin and Torsten Schäfer

In this workshop, we combine findings from climate journalism research and practice with the emerging field of nature writing which has become a vital part of literary journalism, too. Sobihika Vasanthan from India, Roberta Cojocaru from Germany and Violette Cantin from Canada are all journalists, and master students at Aarhus University. 

They will begin the workshop by introducing their visions of new climate stories in the light of a new relationship with “nature”.  Torsten Schäfer will then talk about the findings of his studies in this field within the research project “talking salmon” where Hochschule Darmstadt an OsloMet University collaborate. Schäfer also reports about his own writing experiences as a nature writer and shows examples and results from numerous writing workshops in the woods and along his home river. Participants in the workshop will also be invited to participate, and help answer the question of where climate journalism might go, in order to tell relational stories with which we may overcome the dualism between culture and nature.