The coverage of climate change in the Sheet becomes wider as of this Sunday (29), with the debut of the Planeta em Transe project. The initiative is supported by the Open Society Foundations.
The first content in the series is an interview with Vanessa Nakate, 25, a Ugandan climate activist. She gained notoriety in recent years after leading Fridays For Future protests in her country, inspired by the youth strikes held on Fridays under the command of Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, 19.
In addition to Nakate, the Planeta em Transe project will interview 23 names (a total of 12 Brazilians and 12 from outside the country) who work on the climate crisis, including experts and activists. The conversations will be published fortnightly in text and video, with versions in Portuguese and English.
“Currently, we cannot talk about human rights without talking about the climate crisis,” says Iago Hairon, climate justice coordinator for Latin America at the Open Society Foundations.
“We have to understand the narratives of the people who are on the front lines of this crisis. In Brazil, we need to do this especially with the Amazonian voices. And the Sheet is a very important way for these new voices to be heard,” says Hairon.
“The climate crisis precedes and overlaps with other crises, due to the impact on all people and sectors. Covering it with the rigor of professional journalism and the precepts of our editorial project is the mission of a newspaper like Sheet“, says Sérgio Dávila, editorial director.
The interviews are in charge of journalists Cristiane Fontes and Marcelo Leite, who are also responsible for designing the project, edited by Giuliana de Toledo.
Planeta em Transe will also bring together reports on the environment agenda in the 2022 elections, with an emphasis on problems involving the Amazon. Challenges at the federal and state levels and how they are or are not addressed in political campaigns will be the focus of this work.
“Each year, hundreds of cities in Brazil declare a state of emergency and a state of calamity. Many of these problems are related to the climate crisis. The discussion is not for 50 years from now, we need new public policies for now”, says Hairon, on the relevance of the topic in the candidates’ programs.
The environmental agenda in the elections will also be discussed in an online seminar, open to the public, to be held before the election. The date of the event, which will have simultaneous translation into Portuguese and English, will be announced in due course.
Before that, the project will also organize a digital seminar to balance the climate commitments of Brazil and the world after COP26 (26th UN Conference on Climate Change), held in November 2021 in Scotland. The discussions will serve as a warm-up for COP27, scheduled for November this year in Egypt.
The conference in Sharm el-Sheikh will be accompanied on the spot by reporters from Sheet, also as part of the Planeta em Transe project. In September, Climate Week will also be covered, an event on climate that brings together world leaders in New York.
