The conference entitled “Environment, Conflict, Media”, dedicated to issues of environmental protection and reporting on climate change, was organized yesterday in Sarajevo. It is the final meeting of a wider project in the realization of the network of media houses from Berlin “n-ost” and the Balkan Research Regional Network (BIRN), which gathered representatives of the media, international organizations and competent institutions for the environmental protection sector from the countries of the Western Balkans in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As the program manager of n-ost Elizaveta Kucherova told FENA, topics dedicated to climate change and environmental protection need to be brought back into the public’s focus, even though the current complicated geopolitical situation pushes that topic to the background.
“The very topic of the conference is taking place in the light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which completely changed the focus from the fight against climate change to some other and new topics,” said Kucherova.
She believes that considering its importance, it is necessary to maintain the attention on the subject of climate change and in circumstances in which people are faced with much more dramatic events, even in circumstances in which negative political and economic trends and daily political topics greatly suppress those existential issues such as environmental protection.
Kucherova points out that it is necessary to consider how the wider context affects media coverage of climate change as a global phenomenon and a kind of threat for which solutions must be sought at the regional and local levels.
Project officer at BIRN Hub Ivana Drakić Brkan recalled that the organization of the conference in Sarajevo was preceded by a series of workshops with journalists from the Western Balkan countries, who specialized in reporting on climate change.
She said that, as part of these activities, the stories of 18 participants/journalists were published, most of which are the result of cross-border cooperation, research, and data exchange related to the preservation and protection of air, water, and land quality, as key elements of the environment.
