In the 55 million years the Amazon has been a rainforest, it has never seen a year like 2024.
Scorching heat waves drove temperatures to record highs while a historic drought sunk rivers in the basin to unprecedented lows. At the same time, the largest forest fires in decades charred huge swaths of forest and created plumes of smoke that made Amazonian cities the most polluted areas in the world.
The independent news outlets of the Amazon were on the frontlines of chronicling these disasters, speaking to the communities whose lives had been upended, reporting on the government’s aid response, and performing data analyses and drawing maps to show the historic nature of the environmental conditions. But what most distinguished the climate journalism of these outlets was their reporting on not just the who, what and where--as is present in most media coverage of natural emergencies--but also the why.
“When I started covering the climate, I did coverage that now I don't think is so correct, which was exposing what was happening at that moment and that's it,” said Jullie Pereira, a reporter for InfoAmazonia, an independent data journalism outlet. “You write the story and you don’t go deeper with experts, you don’t go deeper with criticism of the authorities, you don’t bring proposals.”
Instead of this superficial reporting that describes only the specific disaster and its immediate impact, news outlets like InfoAmazonia explain local climate emergencies by incessantly linking them to the global climate crisis and by linking the global climate crisis back to local policies in the Amazon. They explain to readers how climate change has transformed weather patterns in the Amazon, while also investigating the tremendous impact deforestation projects in the region have on the global climate.
The result is in-depth reporting that leaves no doubt about the gravity of the climate crisis in the Amazon and no illusions about the policies that are to blame and the changes that need to be implemented.
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In much of the Amazon, people don’t need to be told that their local climate is behaving strangely. “The people from the Amazon have this perception that the climate has changed in the Amazon. The climate is no longer the same, the rain cycles, the drought cycles have changed,” said Fabio Pontes, editor of Jornal Varadouro, an independent news outlet based in Rio Branco, Acre.
But what’s less visible to the naked eye is the link between the scorching streets of Manaus or the disappearance of the local forest stream to the disasters happening all around the world.
“Our challenge is to talk to the local population about the fact that this is also an effect of what they see every day on the news, be it a forest fire in the United States, a flood in Spain, a typhoon. It’s showing them that all this is connected around the world and here is no different,” Pontes said.
The independent news outlets of the Amazon make that link explicitly, showing again and again that the extraordinary circumstances people in the Amazon are seeing around them are not just anomalies but predictable results from a global climate transformation.
Last year, Amazônia Real began an article about the lack of potable water in Manaus by describing the city as “an example of what science affirms to be the new climate reality in the coming years.” Jornal Varadouro covered the Acre River’s successive floods and droughts in the same article it covered the COP29 climate conference. InfoAmazonia used an exclusive analysis and a collection of intricate maps and visualizations to show that the 2024 drought was in fact an extraordinary climate event that had never been seen before.
To make this connection between local emergencies and the global crisis, these reporters combine science with anecdotal reporting. Data and quotes from expert sources explain the undeniable reality of climate change in the Amazon while poignant reporting on the personal struggles of local populations ground these changes in tangible and visible impacts on human lives.
In InfoAmazonia’s exclusive analysis of the 2024 drought, Pereira explained how a warming Atlantic Ocean had combined with El Niño to inhibit cloud formation over the Amazon. Meanwhile, the outlet’s data team arranged masses of river measurements into charts to show clearly that the 2024 drought wasn’t just more extreme but also came earlier than the Amazon’s typical dry season.
But in addition to this technical reporting on climate change’s role in the drought, Pereira also included heartbreaking stories of communities in the Amazon suffering from the decline of their rivers. For example, visiting the rural community of Uarini, more than 500 kilometers upriver from Manaus, Pereira spoke with a woman who had to give birth without the help of doctors because the drought prevented her from reaching the closest hospital.
It would’ve been impossible to get that story if she hadn’t travelled to the community, Pereira said. “It is important for us to be able to travel to these locations or actually hire local reporters who can tell these stories so that we can understand what is actually happening. This demands resources, this demands staff, this demands interest,” she said. “The work of climate coverage on-site is very important.”
These kinds of personal stories give reporting considerably greater impact in explaining the climate crisis, which can often seem abstract and distant, Pontes said. “I think the role of journalism is to give humanity, visibility, face, voice to the climate issue. To show that people, human beings, are being impacted.”
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But the goal of climate coverage at these independent outlets is not only to show the link between local disasters and the global crisis, but also to show how local actions in the Amazon have an extraordinary impact on both the local and global climate. In doing so, this reporting attempts to stimulate a political awareness among readers about the urgency of the Amazon’s protection and the need for a change in environmental policy in the region.
“It’s a question of also relating [a local climate disaster] to the large projects here in mining, agribusiness, and understanding that it is not something isolated,” said Adison Ferreira, co-founder of the Carta Amazônia news agency in Belém.
Several independent outlets produced in-depth coverage of the Brazilian local elections last year, examining the climate policies, or lack thereof, of candidates in Amazonian municipalities and their direct impact on the climate.
Pontes said that the region needs “a political change where we no longer elect politicians… that use this discourse that the forest is an economic backwardness for the region. As long as we are electing politicians of the level we have today in Acre, with this discourse, deforestation will continue to increase, we will lose more forests and, consequently, the climate crisis will intensify.”
For some, this political engagement is where the Amazon’s independent news outlets most differ from the traditional urban newspapers of the region, which have larger audiences but are openly funded by politicians and corporations, influencing their coverage. Cecilia Amorim, another co-founder of Carta Amazônia, said journalists in the Amazon sometimes label a disaster as caused by climate change, but don’t report on the local deforestation projects that transform both the local and global climate: “They don't specify that it's a direct effect from the agribusiness that invaded that area, from the monoculture of rice that is there.”
The end goal of this kind of reporting on the local causes of the climate crisis is to show readers what needs to change in the Amazon.
“With this journalism that we want to do, we want to build a new social, political awareness in local society, so that people can reflect more,” Pontes said. “We also need to build an economic discourse, to show society--children--that we can grow economically, generate jobs, distribute income, by keeping the forest standing, using the forest in a sustainable, rational way and even through reforestation.”
This final step, of demonstrating the policies in the Amazon that could help combat the climate crisis, is crucial not just to instill political awareness but also to give people hope, a challenging task given the devastation recent disasters have caused.
“We need to have a perspective of hope, because it’s not like everything is going to explode and collapse,” said Pereira of InfoAmazonia. “We will continue here, the Amazon will also continue here. So we need to find ways to make this as good as possible however we can.”
Reporting the Understory