Ladies and good people of zoom climate, Twitter and beyond. Good evening, good afternoon and good morning. Can everyone hear me all right? And can all the speakers see equity?
Okay, brilliant. I can hear you all.
Welcome and hello from Bombay, where it's an unusually hot October post Diwali. I'm Aruna Chandra Shekar and I'm a climate journalist with carbon brief. In case you haven't heard of us carbon brief is an award winning news website. We're based in London, but with at least a few of us in different corners of the world, and we're growing. So carbon brief brings you no frills, just the facts, climate news, policy, science and analysis from the rest of the world. So while we have short breakdowns on just how much the UK could have saved on energy costs if it hadn't got the green crap, we also have stories on how much Lula being in power in Brazil could help the survival of the Amazon rainforest, or how the Green Revolution in Punjab Wheatbelt needs a green transition, and an entire series on climate justice and loss and damage if you missed it. We're also thrilled today to have our partners on this initiative, the Reuters Institute for the Study of journalism on the call in this extremely online day and age, when there's a climate catastrophe, though, every day, everybody's a media critic who gets to rightfully ask, Why is no one talking about this? Our ISG is one of the places where journalists can step out of this firefighting news cycle and engage with the latest media research science and really dig into what's missing or misinforming the news and its priorities. One thing I think we can both agree on is the alarming lack of diverse voices in the media around climate change. Climate has disproportionately affected countries in the Global South. Still, studies in our story show that it's largely white men in the Global North who get called in for their expertise by influential media houses. And that's where this initiative comes in. With this in mind, I'm excited to announce the global south climate database. What is it? Well, the database is a public searchable database of scientists and experts in the fields of climate science, policy and energy. Climate journalists writing your top 27 pieces, please bookmark this page. And get in touch with our experts. A few things about the database itself. We don't pick and choose the databases entirely based on self submission. So Global's outsiders. Please submit your details if you'd like to see your names in there and prepare for journalists on a deadline emailing you from Egypt. So far, I'm thrilled to announce that we have 412 experts from 80 countries on the database, but this is only the start. And so without further ado, I'd like to invite Leo Hickman Ireland chief at brief to talk about the database and why it's a big deal for us. Over at Coventry. Over to you lean.
Hi, thanks, everyone. And thanks for everyone for joining today. Yeah, just before we hear from Asia and Diego but later in more detail about the database I just wanted to say what a thrill it is for carbon brief to be working alongside the Reuters Institute to bring this project to sort of fruition it's been kind of, you know, in the making for quite a few months now, but we're absolutely thrilled by the response that we've already had with people submitting their their names to the database and just from a personal perspective, really I you know, covering climate change is a journalist for a long time myself, I would have loved to have had this resource, you know, many years ago, where I think I really are right in pointing out that the voices and expertise quoted within much of climate journalism over the years has been far too restricted. And it's fantastic now to have this this resource for not just all journalists around the world, but anyone really to sort of look to look at and find really compelling and powerful voices and expertise from across the global south to include within within journalism or whatever projects they're working on. So yeah, I'm so thrilled that this is now officially launched and really looking forward to seeing where it goes. Thank you.
Thanks so much for that Leo. They're also thrilled to have Medallia Mukherjee of RSA with us on the call. Mithali is the director of journalists programs at the Reuters Institute for the Study of journalism. She's a political economy journalists with more than two decades of experience in television in print and digital journalism, and she leads the institute's mission of exploring the future of journalism worldwide. Which is an opportunity to connect, you know, practice as well as research so methodically, it would be great to discuss rsgs involvement and support of the database and
thank you for that Aruna, and that's quite a mouthful by way of introduction. So thank you for walking our our guests and us through it. And thank you as well for setting some context about this database. You know, when we started the Oxford climate journalism network, and we're not that old, we're only about a year old. Our goal was quite clear. We wanted to open up conversations about climate reportage for journalists, particularly from the Global South, and we wanted to support climate conversations and change within the newsroom. We realized that one key asked within that is giving journalists access to specialists and climate experts who have a lot more regional context and understand the history and the trend of the climate conversations we're talking about. This, as we see it is an extremely diverse bank of experts. And we found as well that an obvious challenge was how to how to identify and connect these experts looking for very specific answers, which is why it's fair to say we're very delighted to be partnering with carbon brief briefly in launching this climate database on July when you go through it, I certainly found a lot of joy. It was almost like opening up, you know, the Christmas present early where you were getting searches for countries across Africa across South America, and they were all these expert names that were coming up. What's important, I think, also to notice that these 80 countries are also providing a rich expert opinion in languages other than English. That's really a key goal for us. Helping journalists report in languages find that kind of expert opinion that they're looking for, as you said are not completely in agreement. I think it's a fantastic start with it's only a start. It is a beginning for much, much more than this database will hopefully scale and to my congratulations to the carbon free team for putting this together. A big thank you and congratulations to my own team that is leading the work in climate Diego it is and Kathryn Dunn who have been working shoulder to shoulder with the carbon green team, and I'm very rarely land down from now. Let me hand the baton back to you.
Thanks so much Mithali. And with that we officially have the database launched since launch this morning. There's been so much backend work from both sets of teams so it's great to see this come to life. But now over to the to work hardest on the project. So months ago, my brilliant colleague Aisha was a science journalist with us at carbon brief, wrote a piece examining how diverse climate science is really. And that story brought to light, huge, huge blank spots on the map when it comes to indigenous lead authorship towards funding crunches the hierarchies between who gets to do science in the field and who gets to be first author and that they set off a chain reaction that brings you this database today. Aisha, can you tell us a bit more about the background of this project and show us how it actually works?
Absolutely. Thank you. So yeah, I'm just going to talk a bit about how this project came to be. So as you said earlier about, I think it was this time last year about a year ago, I did some analysis on the lack of diversity within highly cited climate science research. So I looked at the 100 most highly cited papers over a five year periods. But I just looked at who was writing those papers who was being who is the author's and I found that actually nine out of every 10 authors came from countries in the Global North. So only 10% came from the global south and 1% only from Africa. So if you think Africa has 16% of the world's population and only 1% of authorship on a highly cited climate science research that's, I mean, I think that shows very clearly these huge gaps on the map that you were talking about. And in writing this piece, I also spoke to a lot of experts from the global north and the global South, about the process of producing science of researching of publishing, and of why the global south might have such difficulty in reaching the same numbers that the global north does. And there are so many barriers that people have brought up to me things around language barriers, funding, parachute science, lack of mentorship. And there are so many issues that were preventing experts from the global south from getting their work out there. And it was kind of from then on but I decided I really needed to do something about it. So So what could I do? Obviously, I'm not a journal editor. I'm not publishing research myself, but I thought okay, as a journalist I can start amplifying the voices of these experts from the Global South, I can start reaching to them for comments on my pieces. And so I started to do that. And I found it really, really difficult. Because the first place that I look when I'm looking for experts is I go to the authors of scientific papers and obviously just the global south experts that I wanted to contact just were not there as much. And so I started to just make a little list of experts from the global side who I knew I could reach out to. As this list grew longer, I made little form so that people could send it to their colleagues from the global south to fill in and it would just send the results back to me. Some of my colleagues started using the results. And I thought, Hmm, this is something that that we really need. This is a resource that is lacking and that I think journalists from around the world could actually use and it was around this time that Diego came onto the scene, and it has been amazing working with him. He took this idea from well an idea this very small thing I was working on to the huge, formalized projects that you are going to see today. And so we had a soft launch of the database a couple of months ago where we started encouraging scientists to submit their details to the database. And today, more than a year on from when I published my piece and the wheels started turning. I am so excited to say that we can actually show you the database with the scientists on it. So I'm just going to share my screen and I'm going to show you what this database looks like. So I hope you can all see this. This is the global south climates database. So how do you get there? Well, you're going to go either to the link that has been put in the chat, or you're going to go to the carbon brief website, carbon brief.org Go to science and then go right down here to global south climate database, very easy to find. So this database is a publicly accessible, completely free and searchable database of experts in the fields of climate science, energy and policy from the global south. So when I say global South, I mean Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. So this database is fully searchable. For example, if I'm a journalist, and I'm looking to write a story on maybe forests, I can search for us and those experts will come up here. I can then filter further say I want to specifically look at Indian experts. I can filter here or I can filter by say language or
pronouns. If I want to look for people who identify as she her, I can filter by that. And so this database is a fantastic resource. And so once you find an expert who you think you want to contact, this is how you do it. So for each expert, you can see their full name, job title, nationality, their research expertise, very important, but then also things like other languages they speak. Every expert on our database speaks English, but many of them speak many other languages as well. You can see that pronouns you can get a web page about them. So it'll link to maybe their their institutional web page, and then the all important contact details. So email, Twitter phone number, the experts will put the contact details that they think are most applicable that they think it would be easiest for journalists to reach out to them on. And so this database is now fully available and free and I encourage you all to go and use it. And that's all for me arena.
Thanks for the brilliant work through Azure. I'm so excited. I'm also going to take a chance to introduce Ayesha's co pilot and the climate database. Diego gators Are these from RSG and the Oxford climate journalism network. Diego Could you give us a bit of background on again, your involvement and the amazing team that worked with you what's actually on the database so far, and who's submitted the details? Thanks, everyone.
Thanks for the introduction and thanks for everyone for being here. My Michael began when I mean formula, we just we've been seeing this all over case. Since I was working as a reporter in Costa Rica. This is something we've noticed and also how difficult is to find scientists in Nicaragua and Mexican Colombia who I don't know before. But then this year when I started working with the postage again, colleagues from all over the world from the Philippines, from Kenya, they were telling us that they're sores in the ground and feeling frustrated because other scientists will live with them over the world that we're not from the Global South. We're taking I mean, a front front position in the media coverage of climate change. Someone who had expertise who lived or was from Europe, discussing typhoons from the Philippines. I will that is great because ISIS is global. It's also a space for local sources, some of the scientists who understand the context. So we've been discussing this they also Jn in different spaces. And then when are you sure reach out through one of our colleagues? Your equipment also imports for the network? We realized this is an opportunity to just make real something we've been discussing more like theoretically the network something we need to have more spaces for sciences on the global south to be part of the conversation how can make this happen? I will reach hundreds of scientists and what does it report is a little the world at once. And the solution came this to be this database and just to give you a sense of who we have here. If you go back to the to the link, you will see that we have right now. 412 scientists and experts from the global south and we actually widen the scope to experts because not all expertise is scientific and all expertise comes from a fairly like scientist or PhD, professor at university. So that's relevant for us just what is the scope of who is an expert? They come from 80 countries and you might see from the map we have a huge number from from India, from Brazil, from Argentina, from Kenya, from South Africa, but also handful from countries in the Global North. And that's because some of our experts have the word nationalities and that's just part of who they are. And also for me is crucial as a Spanish speaker, a native Spanish speaker is we have 51 language is spoken in database. And this is crucial because if you work as a radio or TV reporter in Argentina, or if you work in Bangladesh, and you didn't work in English over there, then you would like someone who speaks your language who also understand your culture better. So if we find a border group from Colombia who speaks Spanish with me, and this is Spanish is widely represented in the sample that will be useful but we also have Swahili or Arabic we have Nepali so for reporters who who want to know the story in English, but also in other languages, this is a resource and it also feels the same way you should filter earlier on to get a sense of how, who's there who speaks Nepali, Arabic, Russian Chinese is there and it's searchable. The other thing is that we have a very verification process. So everyone who joins the forum will actually you'll find it in the end of the database. So at least this page, whoever finds joins this form goes into our big, like internal database and then we go over with through the names we want one of our colleagues from from our handyman admin group and with him, we still get a sense of ease, first of all, go south and go north or the climate science are connected and have expertise and if they have critiqued us, but we need more info than we might ask them. Can you give us more details about your, your affiliation, your webpage, your experience with climate change? And this is a process critical because we want us to be self registered, we think scientists and experts should choose themselves to be here in the first place. And also we shouldn't be the ones who was to select who should be here and who shouldn't be here. But there should be some sort of filter of the expertise and the quality of the people who here so at least one basic like layer of personal meet here and just to give a sense of our work so far, so we've had like 60 people or so who we've decided did not fit the criteria most because they were working not that we're not going to go south and around four years old, but we're still chatting and getting extra information on like their expertise or their website or something along the process.
Now just to get back to before thinking back to Aluna. If you want to join if you are a global scientist, sorry, especially with Google South if you are a reporter who have sources, send them this forum or just reach out to the back end telephone number assigned to an expert. And we will be filtering this around once a month and getting a new batch of people into the database we have since we have our last cut, which was surrounding early October. We have received over 150 applications that we haven't yet processed. So this is to get a sense of the volume of people we have in the interests of scientists next from the global south. But also if you reach out and you apply just give us a little time and have some patience, because there's a lot of interest in the project and projects. I don't know I'll get back to you and then we can just take it over.
Thank you so much. I'm super excited to see this come to life, especially after all of the work that has been put in by carbon brief and Oxford climate journalism network and everyone who has been working to also do some bit of the background verification but then I think that's pretty much about it, in which we encourage as many scientists to self submit and then that doesn't necessarily speak to usual networks of influence. But another thing that we have to thank Diego and Reuters Institute is our superstar panel of journalists. We have three very special guests with us, courtesy Reuters Institute. And we would like to perhaps chat about some of these issues of you know, who makes it to these panels that speak about climate change or that react to extreme weather events that are happening as they are and it would be great for us to be able to hear from all different perspectives and as many as we can accommodate on the rest of this webinar. So first up, we have Dr. Walker's edges, who is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Oxford climate journalism network. Dr. Jazz you both on both sides of the picture. From the influences on climate journalism in Pakistan, to how people consume news on climate change. For instance, in the last months, we have seen different approaches to how the floods and hippies were covered and viewed internationally. Can you tell us from your research why represent station especially matters in climate journalism?
Dr. Jones, do you hear me? Okay,
thank you very much for the introduction and the awesome work that both Asha and Diego have been doing on this I have been keeping track on that and I'm part of the database as well and looking forward to to contribute in any way possible. Regarding your question is, so actually, I have been given a very small amount of time to condense all the knowledge that I have on this particular issue. But I'll just try to go through first, the good aspects of it and then I'll try to somehow frame it in a way that things that are still needs needs to be done. First of all, the most important thing is that we have been crying that media needs to pay more attention to the climate change because it's the existential threat to humanity. And somehow it has been this this specific call of action has been really paid heed to. We have recently sage coming out and saying that a lot of media across countries is paying more attention to the issue. And there is a significant surge in how many stories are being published or broadcast it across different media, though there are variations across different channels and different countries. But if we see the aggregate level, we see there is a progress being made. So that's the good part. The second thing and that I would like to relate to the recent heat waves across Europe and floods in Pakistan and other countries as well. We still are very much in sort of fancy at this age of fancy where we don't really know how to present the issue itself. And I'm not going to point any fingers that journalists don't know it or you know, they don't pay heed to the to the scholarly work that we do. But for example, our recent research from one of our fellows, James painter, came out just last week where they analyze the heat waves related images published across different newspapers. And their main finding was there was a significant positive valence to the images meaning most of the images were like, framed into fun in the sun kind of images, which is not really the way to depict or to highlight the dangers associated with the extreme temperatures that people are not used to exposed. So and this was across the board in different newspapers that cover we all know as climate scientists and journalists that we the role of media is extremely important. We have so many studies coming out that emphasize that people really changed their behavior if they get the right message, though. We are still trying to figure out why those effects are not such pervasive such such extensive across different demographics, but we have ample amount of research and certain amount of maturity in terms of empirical terms that we have. The media's role is something that can't be neglected. At the essence. I would happy to answer any questions that will come up later on. But just to sum it up.
Something that I really want to again and my brief talk on a happy note is that in the Global North, we are seeing that the journalists are now leaving the alarmist approach, showing climate change as something that is going to be covering it in a frame that that makes the whole issue looks very fearful and induce fear. But however, this is not the case in terms of global south. And there are many reasons to that one and coming from my own research and in relation to the database that we are launching. When I was doing my research in books and I talked to 19 Different journalist and almost everybody said that we are at the mercy of the westernized climate change journalism. So whatever they publish, we have to take the lead from there because one we don't have the local resources experts to talk to and the second we have to just follow the pattern that they have been following so I mean, we can assume that this kind of diffusion would eventually lead to the global south as well. But how but this currently is not the situation that people are still kind of covering climate change in the global south in a way that is very nationalistic. So people are not giving up. You know, this is our right for example, in India, a lot of coverage is related to this is our national issue. And we have to develop ourselves. So we are not going to you know follow certain protocols that have been laid out. Similarly in Pakistan, there is a huge discussion about we are not responsible for this so it is so media is trying to cover this issue as i Okay. There is no self responsibility, but it's the responsibility of developed nations. And all of this in the GST, if I would say that the variations between different countries and global south is are very significant and very soon we are going to launch the work that we have done here at Reuters, where we have investigated global south countries and global North countries, where we ask how do people actually get the news on climate change because a lot of global people have not really been investigated when it comes to climate change journalism. And to my surprise, so far, I'm just giving you the headlines. The findings really are surprising because most global lot people they are still relying on the newspaper, television and newspaper when it comes to climate change news, but the trend is significantly different when I'm talking about control is Brazil, India, Pakistan, where people are extensively relying on social media when it comes to climate change. And we are talking about those countries where the internet or the digital media penetration is rather less. So there are a lot of variations like I said, and we still don't know how people interact with this kind of news. And I hope, the work that we are doing here at Oxford, and with carbon brief, that we can just add something to the to the ongoing discussion. Thank you.
Thank you so much Dr. Jazz that is a lot to get into and unpack and I'm sure if we decided to discuss some of these findings, it would be would be here for a couple of hours. But we really, really look forward to this fascinating piece of research. And which brings us to also to our next speaker speaking of how, of course in terms of media portrayals of global south issues as well. So I would like to introduce our listeners to Dr. Landscape waiver. Cheryl Jackson. Cheryl is from survivor in Samoa in the South Pacific. She worked in the Pacific Islands as a journalist as a media trainer, and as a communications for development specialist in the areas of climate, environment and human rights. language level. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. The Pacific islands are often reduced to a poster child for loss and damage because of climate change. Experts are called on to share their traditional knowledge in 30 seconds. But how in your mind can journalists ensure that they source this knowledge ethically and responsibly from climate impacted communities? In the global south and from global health experts? Cheryl, if
you could unmute your microphone Hi Marina. Okay, here
we are finally. Good morning. It's Alfa Laval Runa and the Reuters Institute team and greetings to everyone who is checking in to the launch this this morning this evening and wherever you are. So this is such an important question and I want to commend the Reuters Institute Diego on the team and carbon brief for supporting this project because it's quite invaluable. You know, you speak of how do we highlight the voices of the global south climate experts this is a constant journey. I can tell you the names of climate experts in all of the Pacific countries because at any given time, there are maybe only five who are able to speak have the clearance to do so and can speak to the subject matter and writing on it's been a long and crazy journey harassing one almost because once you find a good global self expert you are constantly having to go back to them because there's not many of them. And so it's I want to commend the experts who persisted global self climate experts who persisted over time to ensure that the voices of global self climate experts are highlighted in the stories that we cover. So this is indeed an invaluable to that is a tool that is inclusive and truly needed in a climate story. I spend a runner I spend on average three hours per story seeking global self comment before reverting to global North experts and if you work in daily, you know, that's time you do not have. But I always make the time because it's really important that the context of the climate story that set in the Global South, actually is set within the voice of the global south climate expert. So for experts in the Pacific Islands, they are often not featured due to various factors including their availability, the clearance level in their academic institution or organization and also the availability of resources in academic institutions. To highlight and feature the work of these academics and global self experts. So this further prevents exposure to international journalists and international newsrooms who can use their expertise in these stories. Many times I end up with a global Neff North expert, because they are available. They can be called on at 2am in the morning, and they know the value of answering that phone and making that comments whereas the global south expert may not necessarily know that does not have the availability to do so. does not have the funding to even afford to be a bit two or 3am to answer those questions. So this tool will greatly assist in ensuring that we've balanced the voices of climate experts from the international expert to the global south expert which is quite necessary. So but in addition to that, Arun, I want to say that I urge international media and international journalists who do utilize this database to be respectful and be considerate in contacting and in drawing from the expertise of the global south climate experts because there are still cultural nuances. There are still ways that the global south expert can have to relay the story from the ground that should be respectful of the national situations and cultural nuances of the global south. So thank you, everyone for hosting this. And I want to congratulate the Reuters Institute and the Oxford climate journalism network for yet another amazing initiative, which at the end of the day will once again raise the voices of the global south climate expert but also ensure that in telling the climate story that we are being true to the voices of that place, profiting.
Thank you so much, Dr. Jackson, who is now the AP climate collaborator, and is constantly sourcing stories that are rich and that are sensitive and speak to situations in climate impacted communities across the global south. Now finally, I'd like to turn to Jill English, who is a producer and journalist for The National and based in Toronto in Canada. Gil, you've worked on a wide range of stories, especially around biodiversity, and especially in biodiversity rich hotspots in the Global South. How do you find diverse sources as a reporter while you're based in the Global North and do you take any additional factors into consideration? How do you ensure that you report sensitively, and what do you think needs to change and how we tell the climate story of Oh, the impact so far has always been framed as something in the future but now that the world is burning everywhere, it's suddenly a very now issue while these own bags and these are things that you've been writing on for ages?
Yeah, and I think so I went the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is primarily a field producer, but sometimes I'm working on panels and sometimes I'm working on sit down interviews with our hosts and across TV and radio and digital. And so I think that there's a signal within our newsrooms that this is important. I've just recently taken on an international climate producer role where I'll specifically be focusing on climate stories and you know, working as has been mentioned, working in daily news. You're always looking for tools to find good sources as quickly as you can. And seeing something like this. I remember when Diego brought it up in one of our lectures with the Oxford climate journalism network thinking like I cannot wait to listen to this punches. This is such a practical tool that I can use. And I think again, it taps into two things that our newsroom I am seeing in our newsroom where our leadership really wants us to do better getting diverse voices, especially diverse experts. And making sure that those voices are heard, and also doing stronger climate change coverage. And so to see this launch now, the timing is amazing. Like I said, it just started this job four weeks ago. So I'm very excited about it. And also just seeing you know, where the where the potential would be for this to be used in different areas in the newsroom. I have, I know for sure that this will be a useful, a useful tool. We've done some content tracking ourselves, and we know that we need to put more effort into bringing voices from the global south into these stories, and in ways where, again, you're showing these experts not just not just the humans, you know that that are experiencing the hardships and so it's something I definitely intend to share with lots of my colleagues and to help kind of amplify this as much as possible.
Thanks so much. That was incredible. And I think it really also speaks to I think one of the things that you said really stayed with me, which is the idea of, you know, again, you're showcasing expertise and that people in these countries and there are experts and people worked on these issues for ages and climate changes often. It's a regional problem and how and as well as how communities adapt to it. Those are all very locationally dependent and yet we somehow seem to seek out loudest voices or to forefront communities impacted and flatten. What is again, vast wealth of knowledge and we hope via the database that this is something that helps make stories a lot richer and better informed, and speak really to local situations instead of easy attribution. And at the same time, just wanted to say congratulations on your new appointment as cvcs first international time with producer and thanks especially for being on the show. We'd like to thank all of the panelists who have come on to speak now we have a little bit of time to go. So we will be shifting into q&a mode. But as I'm wanting to do, someone who generally is comfortable with asking the awkward questions we will be taking also questions from the audience, but first off a few questions for Diego as well as Asia. So I've taken a look at and gotten familiar with the database as well as the maps. So why does the map show people from Global North countries and yeah, how do you speak to the question about ECB being based in the UK? Reuters, again, is again from an institution that's based in Oxford, aren't these the sort of institutions that we're trying to also to question how, how do we Yeah, answer both of those is, I mean, especially in terms of are we just perpetuating the dominance and why does the map show these countries as some of the questions
Yeah. I can I can take the sun. So if your first question, why does the map show countries in the Global North, but every expert on the database is the national of at least one global south country? So Africa, Asia, Latin America, Caribbean or Pacific? But some people have dual nationality? And that would be why they may be national, two countries and one of those countries may be based in the Global North. And so that's why that's shown on the map. So that's the easier answer to your first question. As your second question, we completely acknowledge that we are sitting in the global north, as as UK based organizations and we are putting together this database for the Global South. And so that's something we're very aware of. What we're trying to do is to encourage the the power dynamic to shift away from us and towards global south countries through a number of steps but most importantly, by itself submission we are not picking and curating the experts who are on this list. We are encouraging experts to sign up themselves. We have also, Diego and Reuters have also hired some journalists from the global south to reach out to their communities and to ask scientists that they know to fill in their details as well. So we're trying to stay out of the process basically, as much as possible. We're using the platform that we have to host the database, but we're trying to keep all of the major decisions and power out of out of our hands and sort of let's let experts from the global south put those forward. Is there anything else Diego?
I think it's called points and to address Haiti, Haiti. For me this question about parameter to at the time he asked in the q&a. I think one point is our expert our prime minister said you haven't produced on climate change or climate adjacent field can be diverted by amateurs, but a better city could be agriculture. And then we have some way of verifying your identity and your expertise. This could be a paper, your science, but it could also be a link to your organization's work. Also, also going back to the questions I saw on the chat from, I think kind of Briar asking about indigenous knowledge or traditional knowledge. If we are able to verify this person's expertise in climate change this could be sorry can be a website could be the contribute to a pad of paper at some point as part of a participative process. The key parties here is as we verified the the entry that we are able to verify who this person is, and I do actually have expertise in climate change. And we chose it perfectly because the process in which people just submit them we verifying instead of Austrian design is precisely to avoid same multiplying more the device we would have, because I might do some sourcing in Costa Rica. And I don't know if I'm in India, but that's even then limited to our circles. So we're trying to make it as open as we can. And it gets individual got to reach out to Oryx and networks in other parts of the world and try to them like reach out to their members and scientists and experts receive that kind of put the word further on.
Thanks to Hugo in Asia. So we have so many Bombyx who says Are there any plans with the carbon brief team to actively find an add people in the database because self selection by people means that social networks and already those already connected are becoming aware and getting registered? And if we add we could ensure more diversity, particularly women or tribal and indigenous and non majoritarian language scientists. How would we plan
to do that? So
let me make this one. I think this is still much in the works. We for now, we're trying to focus one step at a time and just get the base up and running lunch it but so many people have reached out with ideas of how to collaborate networks already running in parts of the world, including collecting Morocco in parts in East Africa, somewhere in South America. So I think as this goes on, we will try to find new ways to engage groups. I'll say we have a reach out. And especially just trying to make sense of who is not here. And it's something we don't have that so right now we haven't figured out who's on here, but figure out who's on here. And then how can we reach them so they're actually represented in the sample. This is a subset a sample this is not the global, like sum of all scientists and experts on climate change in the world. It's something we try to make clear, but this is an attempt to a first step of just trying to find this like this database of who can be reached out.
I think that's really interesting. Don't just say that this is we are early days and were really enthusiastic about as many people as possible, registering and the fact that we're not necessarily closing doors to any kind of expertise, for instance, and this is not only limited to science, this is not just expertise in cordoned off in terms of you know if you having a website or otherwise and we will be trying to get in touch with different scientists and experts who have been engaging on climate change or have been working with communities or looking at policy in various different countries. So there's another question. Is there a way that journalists can be insured or is there a way for them to know who is going to be a good speaker for them to immediately pick up the phone and call and say that, okay, there's this latest thing on agriculture in Africa that's been announced. We've got 27 Do we treat people in terms of media experience is one of the questions which is sort of come in.
Yeah. Yeah. So what we have done is we've included this media experience box on the form so when people fill in the form, they can list any media experience that they they have, and so as a journalist, you can go through and you can look and see what media experience the person has. We are not racing, the experts. We're keeping this very much. If you were a journalist not using this database and you are going out and finding experts again, you would not have anybody externally rating the experts. You would go and look at their past work, and you would see how experienced they are. I think the other thing is if we do start racing experts and say we gave a green rating to 200 of them and a red rating to 200 others that's not you know, there's people with the red rating are probably less likely to be contacted. And I think a lot of the point of this is to get new voices out there into the world. And that kind of comes with experience. And we need a wide range of people on this database to be contacted for that.
Yeah, looking at recent research, which also talks about, especially climate scientists or others, again, in terms of visibility and how do you how it's almost becomes especially impossible to get your work out unless you're on Twitter and unless you're loud on social media platforms, which can become really challenging because what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go into the field and lock yourself away and do science or communicate, which might seem challenging for a lot of robots out scientists who have other pressures, including, especially your funding, so in terms of where those priorities lie, and I think also perhaps, I think one of the other questions which is important out here as well, which is talking about what are the future plans and strategies for the database and advanced search or filter techniques, but most importantly, how do you ensure that people aren't used as tokenism in news or research purposes? Although I think that points the question back at media but do you want to take this
I think on how we're going to make sure the media uses I think we haven't figured this out yet. Trump we talked about, for instance, reached out to outlets I know for instance, a couple big ups around the world. I won't say the names that have already added this link to their internal organs, like sort of like suggestions for reaching out to climate scientists. I think the next steps are building up the database it is keeping on filtering and reach out to those who are not here. And for the filtering. We need to figure out how's it working and then reach out to scientists and reporters, maybe it's important to get a survey on and figure out who and why it's using the database and then see how to improve but for now, we're just really happy to have this up and going and this fantastic resource that we were just we have to put out there
okay, that's amazing. I think we have seven more questions. And we're going to take some of the suggestions here such as someone has asked Sharia per deal as mentioned, that would be good to have an FAQ page. And that's something that we will also intend to have as well as perhaps videos on how to you know, submit these entries but you're also going to have a recording of the webinar if you missed the presentation on anything. But yeah, especially on that note, please, please do submit. We especially encouraged experts as well as scientists from African countries to do so. Especially with cop 27, just around the corner, and possibly looking forward to hosting conversation there with scientists from African countries as well as experts in the middle of God to try and see and inform and feed into some of those other discussions. that are happening behind closed doors, and drawing more attention to what science as well as experts have to say from the region. But on that note, I think we are completely joining to a close. Thank you so much to everyone who has been listening in it's been really fantastic. And for having you join us for the launch of the Global South climate database, please use it. Let us know how it goes. If you're a scientist on the database, let us know if a journalist has approached you. I think one of the things we also might be considering or is is reaching out to itI database, which perhaps with resources on science, communication, or how to really get the word out on some of the research that you're putting out there. We realize it's not just about putting people on a list but in terms of making sure that your message is for people out there. But all of that is something that's in the work works and we should we're always open to suggestions and please get in touch with us you have the GSAT email which will also just drop quickly into the chat. And this has been amazing. Thanks everyone for joining to do to metalli Aisha Diego, Dr. Marquez, Jill and Doug Landry wherever. It's been amazing having you on the call and have a good morning, evening and good night.
