A new database for climate journalists to help tackle ‘twin bias’ against global south

A publicly available database of climate experts has been released – by news portal Carbon Brief and the Oxford Climate Journalism Network – to help journalists cover climate change in the global south. 

“For the global south, there is a twin bias in terms of limited access to climate related information and that most of the expert opinion available is often concentrated in the global north…We believe the Global South Climate Database will provide a pool of high quality and impactful expertise, with rich regional and cultural context to climate issues,” said Mitali Mukherjee, director of journalist programmes at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which runs the Oxford Climate Journalism Network.

The Global South Climate Database lists more than 400 experts from 80 countries “who collectively can conduct interviews in more than 50 languages”.

“Journalists covering climate change face a variety of challenges, not least how best to reach beyond the small pool of familiar expert voices that they so often turn to for quotes. The fact that the majority of these experts hail from the global north only further distorts and exacerbates the imbalance and injustice of how the world is informed about climate change,” said Leo Hickman, editor and director of Carbon Brief.

The database contains details of climate scientists and experts from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific. Experts from across the world can submit their details to the database here. Each entry will be verified – including the expertise and institutional affiliation of the expert – before it is added to the database.