By: Nuaman Ishfaq Mughal
MANSEHRA: Local journalists and environmental activists of the district participated in a training workshop that sought to improve their reporting on climate change issues. The training was aimed at imparting skills and giving participants new dimensions of reporting on climate change ahead of the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties (COP26), which will be held in November 2021 in Glasgow, the United Kingdom (UK). COP26 will be the biggest summit the UK has ever hosted.
A one-day workshop on Climate Change Reporting was organized under “Gender Mainstreaming and Climate Change in Pakistan” was made possible due to support by British Council. The speaker of the workshop was Dr. Adil Khan, Assistant Professor at Hazara University Mansehra. The participants were engaged in group activities and a focused group discussion on climate change, its effect on the environment and role of youth in protecting the local habitats as well as reporting environmental degradations and creating climate change awareness content in local languages.
Workshop participants also shared their insights and pledged to work in a more coordinated way for climate change issues in their local communities. “It is the need of the time to sensitize journalists and digital media content developers about climate change reporting,” one participant of the workshop said.
Nuaman Ishfaq Mughal, an alumnus of the Future News Worldwide programme, is focal person of the “Gender Mainstreaming and Climate Change in Pakistan” project, which is supported by the British Council. The project was based on a number of activities to develop climate change adaptation and nature preservation in Pakistan. Under this project, workshops on climate change reporting for journalists and activists were held in Islamabad, Mansehra and Muzaffarabad where they were trained about climate change reporting, creating climate change awareness content in local languages and their role in mainstreaming gender in climate change adaptation and mitigation in their communities.