Burning Questions: Covering Climate Now, an unprecedented climate special, takes viewers on a journey across the country and around the world to the frontlines of the climate crisis. Featuring the reporting of award-winning journalists, the one-hour documentary explores the burning questions: Who is paying the price for climate change? How bad can it get? What can we do about it? and Will we act in time? Co-hosted by NBC Today’s Al Roker and NBC News’ Savannah Sellers, the program travels from Senegal to Samoa, Charleston to Los Angeles, and Greenland to Glasgow, highlighting families who are losing everything to drought, fire, and rising seas while politicians wrangle and corporations obstruct.
Produced by the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now, Burning Questions: Covering Climate Now is now streaming on WORLD Channel’s YouTube channel. Never before has reporting from so many major news organizations been brought together to tell the climate story. Journalists from the Guardian, Agence-France Presse, the Los Angeles Times, Sesame Workshop, Al Jazeera English, PBS NewsHour, TIME, Channel 4 (UK), the Charleston Post and Courier, and more take viewers behind the scenes, recounting not only the stories in their award-winning coverage but how they went about reporting them.
The special begins by sharing how many people are now directly affected by climate change. Increasingly, the public sees these impacts happening out their window and they want to understand why it is happening. As a result, media coverage of climate change is expanding at media outlets worldwide. “The extraordinary journalism featured in Burning Questions: Covering Climate Now was recently honored by the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards. The power of this reporting lies in the human stories, which convey both struggle and resilience,” said Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review and co-founder of Covering Climate Now.
Over 900 entries from 65 countries were submitted to the Awards, and winners were announced in May. Good climate journalism is essential to help the public connect the dots from changes in global temperatures to the extreme weather that might be confronting people right in the backyard. Savannah Sellers points out in the program that only when we all understand what’s at stake and how to fix it will we be able to find a way forward together. Organized by journalists, for journalists, Covering Climate Now is a non-profit, non-partisan collaboration of more than 500 news outlets committed to better coverage of the defining story of our time. Funding provided by: Schumann Media Center, Park Foundation, One Earth Fund, Sustainable Markets Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, Michaux Family Foundation, Taylor Family Charitable Fund, and Actions@EBMF.
“The journalists of Burning Questions: Covering Climate Now have dedicated their careers to spotlighting the many ways in which climate change is impacting communities around the globe, and to finding a way forward through sustainable solutions,” said Christopher Hastings, Executive Producer of WORLD Channel at GBH in Boston. “WORLD Channel is proud to provide a platform for viewers to experience this exceptional reporting and to learn about the human impact of climate change and the people who feel its effects daily.”
WORLD shares the best of public media in news, documentaries and programming, and is carried by 191 member stations in markets representing over 74% of US TV households. Funding for WORLD Channel is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Wyncote Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and Artworks. WORLD is produced by GBH in partnership with WNET and is distributed by American Public Television (APT).