By Elizabeth Larkwor Baah
Tema, July 26, GNA – Ms. Mary Ama Kudom-Agyeman, Executive Director, Media Platform on Environment and Climate Change (MPEC), has urged media personnel to specialize and leverage the opportunities in environmental reporting.
MPEC is an initiative of a group of professionals from journalism and other fields who have come together to address the communication gap identified in Ghana’s efforts to address science, environment, and natural resource governance issues.
Ms. Kudom-Agyeman was speaking to the Ghana News Agency said there were many benefits in environmental reporting, but getting journalists interested in the field was difficult.
She, however, explained that to benefit from such initiatives, it was important for the journalist to initially sacrifice time, resources and build capacity.
She encouraged journalists to invest, and undertake stories in the field to serve as proof, adding that environmental reporting was not about sitting in the newsroom and covering occasional press conferences and seminars but rather going into the field to gather information for publication.
She said journalists must also very observant, identify key issues in their various communities, talk to people, know the challenges in their environment, and report on such issues.
“As a journalist, you are not an island, so it’s not an issue of you sitting somewhere and just reporting what is happening, you are part of it. If anything happens to a group of people and you happen to be around that area, you are going to be affected,” she stated.
She said due to low reporting on environmental issues, existing challenges kept compounding, resulting in the intensification of land degradation, mining activities, and the focus on planting cash crops rather than food crops, among others.
The Executive Director of MPEC said strengthening reportage on the field would raise awareness of some health and other complications associated with improper handling of the environment.
She said environmental journalism encompassed everything within the environment: “doing environmental journalism is not just about the green, it’s about the brown; it’s about the yellow; it’s about the black; it’s about the red.”
GNA