Understanding how climate metrics can support journalism

Details: 10th July 2023, 13:00-14:00 (GMT+1) - Online

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This event is open to all journalists and science communication professionals.

Event summary

Climate change is starting to affect every beat – yet the climate data produced by the science community can be difficult to find or digest. That makes it hard to bring out the climate angle in an existing news story without making the whole story about climate change. For example, how to cover the impact of climate change on food price spikes? Or on international conflicts – like the one in Sudan? Or use it to explain an unusual but pleasantly warm day in April that draws many people to the beach? 

In this talk, Kris De Meyer (UCL Climate Action Unit) will present a trio of climate metrics designed to fill these communication needs. In particular, the session will cover how the team simplified complex climate data so that it can support a different form of climate storytelling – one where it can be a (small) part of every relevant story, without every story needing to headline climate change.  

By joining this event, you will be among the first to see a dashboard of three new climate change metrics, developed through a ground-breaking collaboration with the data providers, designers and comms experts. 

The session will also cover: 

• the characteristics of data and metrics that make them good communication tools (starting from what we can apply from COVID communication to the domain of climate change) 
• the narratives that climate metrics can support 
• how journalists can help evolve new narratives and climate metrics in the future 
• how to use the metrics to communicate about the difference between 1.5C and 2C 

About the speaker

Kris is a neuroscientist, science communicator and science-policy co-production expert; bringing insights from neuroscience and psychology to the domain of climate change. He is the Director of the UCL Climate Action Unit (CAU) and is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at UCL. 

Further information

If you have any accessibility requirements or concerns about your ability to participate in this event please contact the event Project Manager (Freya Roberts) at climateactionunit@ucl.ac.uk 

Find out more about the UCL Climate Action Unit’s work developing climate metrics here.