Having witnessed the damaging antics of carbon cowboys and, more recently, self-interested greenwashing industry in REDD+ forest projects in PNG, I was sceptical and intrigued about the notion of “high integrity” carbon. So, I went to the Solomon Islands to see what it looked like on the ground. This issue is one of the most … Continue reading
Very chuffed to be a finalist in the 2023 Melbourne Press Club Quills Best Feature for my story “Climate justice in the Pacific” for The Monthly magazine. Congratulations to fellow finalists (below) in this and all categories. And good luck also to our Unimelb Master of Journalism alum and superstar talent Sasha Gattermayr who is … Continue reading
In late 2022 I did a couple of field trips in PNG exploring questions of climate change, climate justice & locally lead responses to changing conditions. As well as visiting coastal areas, where rising seas are the urgent issue, I went to the highlands where shifts in rainfall and conditions can wipe out crops and … Continue reading
So excited and honored to be awarded the Australia Museum Eureka Prize for Science Journalism in Sydney last week. The prize was for my 2022 piece for Griffith Review on the quest for a million year old ice core – Buried Treasure: A Journey Into Deep Time. It’s a story about both the smallness of … Continue reading
(Photograph: Angela Wylie) Over much of the past 15 years or so, I imagined I had developed two main ‘streams’ of storytelling expertise and networks. One could be broadly categorised as human rights, encompassing stories on health, disease, women and children, aid and development; the other was on climate science, often tracking scientists to their … Continue reading
“It strikes me, after 14 years (on and off) reporting from all over PNG, that climate damage is the most tangible return many grassroots people have ever known on those gazillions of gallons of extracted fossil-fuel wealth.” I spent a couple of weeks last year visiting three villages in PNG dealing with climate impacts – … Continue reading
UPDATE: Tune into ABC RN Big Ideas on 23 November for a discussion on this! In 2007 and again in 2008/09 I was lucky enough to spend time in Antarctica researching stories on Australia’s scientific work there, reporting on changes to the polar ice and Southern Ocean, and what they can tell us about our … Continue reading
I returned to PNG in September – thanks to the Walkley Foundation/Sean Dorney Pacific Journalism Grant – to collect field reports and interviews for a forthcoming story for The Monthly on climate justice. But as always in PNG, I came across so many other urgent and important stories. This was one of them. I was … Continue reading
As a serial ‘parachute’ journalist, dropping in & out of places not my own, I’m all too aware of the shortcomings of this model of reporting. Thinking out loud about how to tell truer, deeper stories of climate impacts in the Pacific in this critical moment, I’m grateful for the insights of Katerina Teaiwa and … Continue reading
I was supposed to be researching matters of climate justice in the Pacific. Instead over the long Melbourne lockdown in the pandemic winter of 2020, I was in my home nursing a bad case of Black Summer grief. This essay captures my attempts to wrangle that into something useful, going back to scientific experts who … Continue reading
Notebook & Narrative by Jo Chandler 