Climate Media Centre
$40,000 | May 2023
What do CMC do?
The Climate Media Centre (an independent Climate Council program) is Australia’s go-to bureau for climate stories - connecting journalists with more than 5,000 trained spokespeople from a diverse range of backgrounds including firefighters, farmers, athletes, doctors, climate litigants, Traditional Owners, renters, extreme weather survivors and young people.
Why is this work important?
In order for good climate decisions to be made, decision makers need the right information, must believe it is in their interests (or the interests of their community), be accountable and feel the decision will be backed in. We work hard to create the pre-conditions in which good decisions are made (resulting in emissions reduction) and bad decisions are avoided (preventing actions that would increase or fail to arrest the rise of emissions). CMC seek to create a virtuous cycle, where others feel compelled and inspired to act.
One of the key pre-conditions for good decision making is that the public must be perceived as wanting change, so decision makers feel that it is reputationally damaging not to act. The CMC creates this pre-condition by driving a constant drumbeat of media stories which reinforce the message that climate change is affecting all of us and that action is an urgent priority, while simultaneously socialising the solutions needed. Furthermore, the CMC holds decision makers accountable in the media, through mobilising journalists to bring attention to key decisions, and elevating the voices of constituency groups that decision makers care about.
How is Groundswell supporting this work?
With Groundswell’s support, a Senior Media Advisor will deliver three hours of support to key climate spokespeople and a range of grassroots campaigns everyday for a full year, empowering them to reach their peers through the media tens of thousands of times, and fundamentally transforming the faces and voices of climate change Australia to ensure this issue is relevant for all audiences.
The key narratives this will help support include:
to elevate key voices and influential messengers during winter, when power price rises are likely to hurt many Australians. Leveraging the CMC’s industry knowledge (which enables access to innumerable strong media opportunities) - winter presents a critical window to drive the narrative that rising costs of living and the climate crisis are inextricably linked, and must be solved in tandem.
to reinforce the link between burning fossil fuels, accelerating climate change and harm to communities via worsening extreme weather. Climate experts and emergency leaders are warning that as Australia enters a neutral or El Nino period after a protracted La Niña episode, there is a major risk of fires across the 2023-24 Summer.
to build on momentum to obliterate the social licence for fossil fuels. Across several years, the CMC has been working on a number of key campaigns that will help obliterate the social licence for fossil fuels - from supporting athletes to speak out (e.g. spokespeople from FrontRunners) to elevating the cases of climate litigants in partnership with the Environmental Defenders Office.