"How can I help?"

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And that is one of my wishes too.

"How can I help?"

If you have some inkling that climate change is (a) real, (b) bad, and (c) solvable
and you want to help but are not entirely sure what the right way to go about is, here are my suggestions:

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Step 1: Get Informed


Information (especially the right information) does not regularly come our way by its own self. It has to be sought. If you want to help, here is my suggestion for getting started.

Step 1: Commit to learning about the climate crisis on a regular basis.


There are many ways to do this. For starters, you can follow updates by

(i)   Institutions that are work on this crisis
(ii)  Media houses that cover the crisis
(iii) Journalists who cover the crisis
(iv) Experts working in this domain

(i) Institutions

I suggest beginning with the monthly newsletter by NASA (subscribe here). The monthly frequency of the newsletter should avoid overwhelming you at the very start. NASA has a very interesting and interactive page on climate change, and is a reliable source of information. There is enough to be learnt browsing those pages for several months (I assume you don't do this full-time). This is a science-focused newsletter.

Carbon Brief and Climate Action Tracker also offer weekly/daily newsletters, but these require prior understanding and can be overwhelming in the beginning. If you have spent a few months with the NASA newsletters, you should give these newsletters a try.

For an India-centric newsletter, I suggest the ones by Carbon Copy.

The most comprehensive source of information are the IPCC Reports. The IPCC is a UN body, named the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. It compiles information from experts across various domains -- and hence covers not just the scientific, but also the social and economic aspects about the climate crisis. The IPCC reports are quite advanced but the summaries (SPMs / Executive Summaries) are essential reading for anyone working in this field.


(ii) Media houses

Based on my casually chronicled experience, here are my suggestions:
Assessing media houses on their commitment to covering the climate crisis is difficult. It is simpler for each reader to assess if their preferred media-house is doing an okay job covering the issue. A simple litmus test is to visit their website, search for the keyword "climate change" and see the results. Do the results talk about scientific facts at all? Do they provide you informed opinions by experts? Do they only focus on propaganda?

You will notice that some Indian media houses cover the issue without any discussion of the facts, but only in conspiratorial or political tones. If your preferred newspaper or news channel never speaks about the climate crisis in a factual way, chances are, you're severely under-informed. You deserve better. If a media house is not talking constructively about climate change in 2024 (at least 80 years after its discovery and 30 years after it became a recognised global problem), they're either seriously bad at their jobs, or they're being paid by the fossil-fuel and the industrial lobbies to help delay climate action. My suggestion is to discard their services, just like you'd do with any other bad product / service.


(iii) Journalists

Once again, based on my casual observations, I have found the following journalists to be doing good work in covering the climate crisis:
  1. Bibek Bhattacharya - @sarvatathagata
  2. Aruna Chandrasekhar - @aruna_sekhar
  3. Jayashree Nandi - @jayashreenandi
  4. Jocelyn Timperley - @jloistf
  5. Nidhi Jamwal - @JamwalNidhi
  6. Bhasker Tripathi - @BhaskerTripathi
  7. Steven Mufson - @StevenMufson
  8. Ajit Niranjan - @NiranjanAjit
Even if you're not on Twitter, it is easy to look out for their articles with a simple Google search. If you're going to spend any of your time reading about the climate crisis, devote it to better articles.


(iv) Experts

Social media now gives you the option of directly finding out what the experts think about the issue. This can be overwhelming at first because it takes a while to 'catch up' with their tweets. But I find this a very effective way of getting insights straight from the horses' mouths. Some suggestions:

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 By giving a multitude of options, it is my hope that most readers would find at least one which suits their level of understanding and their preference in style of writing.

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