Highway Africa's Reporting Development Network Africa (RDNA) is currently providing a news service at the summit itself, whose output can be viewed online at http://reportingdna.org/blogs / - edited by Grocott’s editor Steven Lang and staffed by numerous JMS students past and present - and providing a unique insider’s view of COP 17 as it happens.
Indeed, this initiative is the culmination of Highway Africa’s theme and activities for 2011, which focused on sustainable development and climate change - with a variety of workshops, book launches, sessions and colloquia on climate change over several months. The theme of its annual conference, held from 17-19 September in Cape Town, was “African Media and the Global Sustainability Challenge”. The conference featured an array of high-profile media leaders, journalists, policymakers and academics discussing the role of media in reporting climate change and the challenge of sustainable development. This included a a colloquium of journalism educators on the topic of 'Journalism and Climate Change in the Global South', of which a selection of papers will be published in a special themed issue of the journal ‘Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies’ edited by Deputy Head of School Prof. Herman Wasserman . (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/recq)
Prof. Wasserman also recently gave a talk in Johannesburg as part of a panel that was put together by the South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) - dealing with the South African media's response of Climate Change - in which Prof. Wasserman addressed the frequency, prominence and tone of climate change coverage. This included the fact that the amount of coverage by the media is not normally commensurate with the scale of the issue; the infrequency of coverage and its use more as a special feature rather than forming a dimension of general reporting; the apocalyptic sensationalism or its opposite notion that climate change is a distant problem, which coverage is usually cloaked by and the lack of humanisation of the issue of climate change. A clip of the talk is available on http://bit.ly/v4upow.
Ultimately, while everyone by en large is in agreement that environment and climate change are important issues, the fact remains that for the most part they are ignored. And it is here that Rhodes JMS and Highway Africa are playing a vital role in giving them the public profile and credence they deserve.