By Justine Calma, a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
Attacks against environmental journalists have risen dramatically across the world, according to a report released by UNESCO to commemorate World Press Freedom Day.
UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists surveyed 905 journalists across 129 countries. Between 2009 and last year, more than 70 percent of reporters experienced attacks while working on environmental stories ranging from mining and deforestation to protests and land grabs.
There were more than 300 attacks reported over the past five years alone, a 42 percent jump from the previous five-year period. The attacks come in many forms, from legal threats and online harassment to physical violence and death threats — although physical attacks were most common. They were carried out by authoritarian governments, corporations, and criminal groups.
This is the kind of ugly thing that doesn’t go away unless you stare it in the face
As an environmental journalist, I’m horrified but not surprised. I’m also somehow relieved that there’s data to document the stories journalists share with each other while out in the field or recovering over a meal. This is the kind of ugly thing that doesn’t go away unless you stare it in the face.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being an environmental reporter. Wandering deep into a forest is a great day on the job. But sometimes the remote nature of this work can be a risk. Working in secluded areas while reporting on issues like logging or illegal waste dumping can leave environmental journalists “far from the reach of immediate help or legal protection,” the report says.
Media companies have also gutted science desks as a result of budget cuts, affecting newsrooms as storied as National Geographic and Popular Science. Cutting environmental reporters loose to work as freelancers can leave them isolated in a different kind of way. According to the survey, freelancers experienced more attacks than others with full-time media jobs.
The UNESCO report describes environmental journalism as “a precarized occupation often left to small and underfunded news outlets and independent reporters who lack the resources to mitigate the risks they face and to respond to the attacks they suffer.”
I know from experience that the work we do can piss a lot of people off. Holding a company, government, or criminal organization accountable for wrongdoing makes a story worth telling. It may also be a story worth suppressing in the eyes of the perpetrator.
State actors were responsible for around half of the reported attacks against environmental journalists. This tracks with the rise of pundits and politicians who have tried to erode public trust in media, along with the rise in disinformation campaigns about climate change.
This affects all kinds of journalists, of course. Reporters Without Borders released its World Press Freedom Index today, which shows where journalists face the most backlash. “This year is notable for a clear lack of political will on the part of the international community to enforce the principles of protection of journalists,” the organization says.
The Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has made it a particularly deadly year for journalists, where there have been a record number attacks on the media, according to Reporters Without Borders, citing that more than 100 Palestinian reporters have been killed by Israel Defense Forces.
This also happens to be the biggest election year in world history, with more people casting their votes in national elections than ever before. Elections often portend more violence directed at journalists, Reporters Without Borders warns. And diminishing those voices can keep voters from making the most informed choices at the ballot box.
It’s getting harder to do our jobs even in the places where reporters have sought refuge. I recently came back from a reporting trip in Costa Rica, which has historically been a sanctuary for journalists in Central America. It’s now home to hundreds of journalists from Nicaragua and Guatemala who have had to flee for fear of government reprisal. I met an editor who opened up her home to a reporter who hiked through the rugged terrain with little more than the clothes on his back to get there. But the 2022 election of right-wing President Rodrigo Chaves Robles, who has lambasted any press critical of him, has started to chip away at that safe haven.
I’m reminded of how lucky I am to do what I do with the protections I have in the US, even though I’m facing the potential return of a president who spent much of his last term deriding legitimate journalism as “fake news” while simultaneously rolling back more than 100 environmental protections in the nation.
The identities we carry outside of being journalists come under attack, too. Women experienced online attacks more frequently than men, the survey found. I’ve also found as an Asian American journalist that race comes up in angry comments to my stories — like one reader who told me in an email to “go back to your birth country … and try having that country support your climate position.” The Philippines, where I was born, happens to be one of the nations with the most attacks on environmental defenders.
As a reporter at least, I have an escape hatch once a story is done. That’s not an option for many of the people I’ve interviewed who face violence in their struggles to protect their home and environment. In 2022 alone, at least 177 land and environmental defenders were killed — enough to lose one person every other day, according to the group Global Witness that tallies the deaths each year.
I find solace in the camaraderie I’ve found with other journalists documenting our beautiful planet and the marks we leave on it. Along with its report, UNESCO also highlighted work from several environmental photojournalists, including a photo by Manuel Seoane of a lone person standing on a small boat stranded on a dry, cracked lake bed. It’s Lake Poopó in Bolivia, which has vanished over the past decade. It’s “a stark reminder of the harsh realities of climate change,” Seoane writes on Instagram. “In a world where misinformation spreads rapidly, it is crucial to tell this story.”
In an email to The Verge, Seoane shared a quote from Rufino Choque — the person in the photo who is a member of the Indigenous Urus people:
Us, the Urus, were called “the people of the water”. All our life we have been inside the lakes, all we ever used and consumed came from there. The lake was our only possession. Since the lake has dried out we have also changed, we have gone sick, even our skin seems to be different. Like the birds when they change their feathers, we also do.
Amelia Holowaty Krales contributed to this report.
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