People everywhere are experiencing economic crises such as inflation and growing unemployment, health crises from pandemics to hunger, political crises from the rise of authoritarianism to war, and a collapse in traditional trusted information sources, all in the midst of accelerating climate and environmental harms acting as a threat multiplier.

For journalists, “to report the news in the current global moment is to observe a world in crisis,” as EJN’s latest report, “Are Journalists Reporting the Global Polycrisis?” acknowledges in its opening line. 

This confluence of crises is increasingly referred to as a global polycrisis, in which crises within multiple global systems—the economy, public health, the media, governance, climatic and oceanic systems—become entangled in ways that increase the severity and intensity of each other more than they would have on their own.

Even so, 68% of the 744 journalists surveyed from 102 countries reported never or rarely using the term “global polycrisis” in their reporting, and they similarly don’t believe their audiences understand the concept, either—only 9% reported media audiences in their country understand the term “very much” or “extremely so”. But there is interest: in interviews, journalists demonstrated “concern and a reasonable level of knowledge on our planet’s intersecting problems.”

This report, which aims to provide insight into these findings, is a companion to EJN and Deakin’s landmark study released on June 5, “Covering the Planet: Assessing the State of Climate and Environmental Journalism Globally”. It seeks to understand whether journalists comprehend the intersecting nature of global crises, how they report on those intersections and whether they use the term “global polycrisis” in their coverage. 

Citation: Mocatta, G., Saville, S., Payne, N., Jansson, L., Lai, J., & Hess, K. (2024). Are journalists reporting the ‘global polycrisis’? A report for Internews’ Earth Journalism Network. Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. http://doi.org/10.26187/565t-ja43