As climate change and environmental issues take a continually higher place on the global agenda, many news organisations are reconsidering their reporting strategies. One useful source of news and resources on the topic is AlertNet's Climate Change section, from the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Editors Weblog spoke to Laurie Goering, editor of AlertNet's Climate section, about the project and the issues associated with climate change reporting.

AlertNet aims to provide information in humanitarian crisis situations. The Reuters Foundation, now the Thomson Reuters Foundation, created AlertNet in 1997, after reports of poor coordination between emergency relief charities on the ground during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 spurred the news agency into looking what could be done to remedy this. As Goering said, "Good, accurate, reliable information can be a form of aid, saving lives," and it is this aid in the form of information that the Foundation decided to provide.

As AlertNet's website explains, "Reuters has traditionally been strong in handling fast-moving information" and its online focus " is particularly well-suited to alerting services." AlertNet pays particular attention to 150 nations around the world which are seen as particularly vulnerable to humanitarian crises. Such crises could be health, sudden-onset, food-related and conflict, and the site specifies that because of Reuters' commitment to track all such emergencies as far as possible, the service provides coverage of those which might not receive much coverage elsewhere.

AlertNet aggregates Reuters material from around the world and specific AlertNet staff are based in London, Bangkok, Delhi, Bogata, Nairobi and Dakar. Membership is open to national NGOs working in emergency relief.

The fact that AlertNet, which deals with crises, has created a specific climate change section is testament to the importance that the Reuters Foundation places on the threat from climate change to humanity.

For the climate page of AlertNet, Goering has recruited a group of about 20 developing world freelance writers who specialize in environmental, development and science topics. Their pieces are edited by Reuters staff, and are added to those gathered from Reuters bureaux around the world.

"I think our most important work so far has been focusing on how climate change is affecting communities today, not in some hazy future," Goering said. She believes that AlertNet is crucial in highlighting "how climate change figures into so many kinds of existing concerns: security considerations, migration and displacement, agriculture and food security, health, poverty reduction efforts, conditions facing women and justice issues, to name just a few."

AlertNet offers a free 45 minute eLearning course "designed to help journalists connect the dots between climate change and humanitarian emergencies," testing journalists on their knowledge and offering potential story angles on the humanitarian side and clean energy. It also groups together a large number of reports on key climate change issues as a resource for journalists.

Climate change is a difficult topic to cover, given the controversy that surrounds it. In addition, as a conference last year noted, public opinion plays an important role in influencing political leaders and the public, in turn, is influenced by the media. "It's certainly a complex topic and a controversial one, where getting things right and putting them in the proper perspective is important," said Goering.

In March last year, the chairwoman of the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, Katherine Richardson, declared that the task of informing the public about climate change should not be left to journalists. She argued that journalists work for organisations that are more interested in making money than clearly presenting an accurate interpretation of climate change. Instead, she believes that communicators within the scientific community should be trying to get the message across.

The issue of climate change reporting is complicated by the question of how to deal with climate change skeptics. Journalists always seek to present a balanced argument, taking different points of view into account, and therefore end up giving significant space to climate change skeptics, who in fact make up a small minority of scientists compared to those who believe that the environment is threatened by climate change.

Much debate arose in October last year after a blog posting by BBC climate change correspondent Paul Hudson entitled "What happened to global warming?" made it onto the official BBC News website. The article outlined the arguments of climate skeptics and although it is not entirely one-sided, the reader is left with the impression that global warming might well not exist. This would not be problematic for an opinion piece, but the article was not clearly labeled as such and hence some readers could have concluded that the BBC was supporting the skeptics.

Goering said that she thinks media outlets are struggling with the issue of balance. "Reporters want to balance stories, and a note of caution about climate modelling figures, for example, is probably called for, both in terms of them potentially understating as well as overstating the coming problems." She sees room for improvement and believes that "most of us haven't done an adequate job pointing out the ties between climate sceptics and some of their corporate funders, or figuring out how to balance a flood of virulent blog comments or letters to the editor from climate sceptics with more mainstream and representative comments."

Goering also commented that "coverage has been generally building over the last four years now, which is a good thing," but that there was still a tendency for "wild swings" in the amount of coverage, with a huge amount of attention directed at climate change before the Copenhagen summit last year, for example, but then a significant drop off afterwards.

Recent climate change coverage initiatives include the Guardian's EnivronmentGuardian.co.uk, which has 19 staff working on a project to "provide unrivalled news coverage from around the world alongside practical tips and analysis on green living," and the Climate Desk, for which several American news outlets have come together to produce articles exploring climate change issues.

The growing awareness of the need to cover climate change and other environmental issues effectively and thoroughly is a positive sign, and hopefully the work of AlertNet in this field is helping to provide aid where it is needed.