Thursday, May 21, 2009

Climate Change Media Partnership invites applications for the 2009 fellowship programme

The largest group of developing-world journalists returns to boost media coverage of climate change in a critical year of negotiations.

The Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP) has today opened its 2009 Fellowship Programme. It encourages all journalists in developing countries who report on climate change to apply.

This programme comes during a critical year of negotiations that ends in December with the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen where a new global deal could be struck.

Forty journalists will be awarded fellowships which will give them skills training and access to world class experts to enhance their knowledge. They have until midnight UK time (BST) on World Environment Day, 5 June, to file their applications.

The innovative programme is organised by the CCMP partners Internews, Panos and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), along with numerous regional groups.

"Climate change will disproportionately impact developing nations, yet journalists from these countries rarely have the resources to attend the intergovernmental negotiations aimed at tackling the problem,”

says James Fahn, Global Director of Internews' Earth Journalism Network.

Patrick Dambula, a former CCMP fellow from Malawi, highlights the importance of the fellowships: “There are so many journalists in Malawi who don’t know what climate change is all about and they go on to report the issue, which means there are chances they can misinform the people”.

The CCMP aims to address this by involving journalists from across the global South in a programme of activities over several months, including reporting on the Copenhagen summit. Here, in addition to receiving training and mentoring, they will take part in a media clinic and interview sessions with leading climate change experts and negotiators.

The CCMP has already brought a total of 74 developing country journalists from print, broadcast and online media to the last two UN climate summits, in Indonesia and Poland. At these meetings, the journalists produced over one thousand climate-change stories for media worldwide. At both summits the CCMP formed the largest single media group, providing politically independent journalistic scrutiny of the negotiations.

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