For more than a decade, the Earth Journalism Network’s Climate Change Media Partnership has brought reporters from around the world together to cover the annual United Nations Climate Summit as well as to network and form connections, the fruits of which continue to ripen.
It was at the climate change COP in 2018 that Catherine Cai, a Fellow from China, met Abhaya Raj Joshi from Nepal, Karthikeyan Hemalatha from India and Amar Guriro from Pakistan. The group became fast friends, eventually calling themselves Team Panic, a portmanteau of their places of origin. They then went on to win a US$3,350 grant to report on clean energy from Clean Energy Wire, a Berlin-based media site focused on energy and climate policy.
After months of in-depth reporting, the team has produced six stories – one on each of their home countries and two joint, cross-border features that were published on Southern Energy Observer and Online Kabar.
The stories look at how China’s solar panel policy, which subsidizes photovoltaic production to meet national targets for enhanced solar energy capacity, has helped countries in South Asia undergo a similar clean energy transition. Despite that progress, however, current policies in India could dampen efforts to promote solar energy, Hemalatha writes in an interview with solar energy expert Tim Buckley. Guriro meanwhile, takes readers into a small fishing hamlet more than 100 kilometers from Pakistan’s capital, Karachi, to illustrate how solar power is lighting up villages long removed from the electric grid.
Read the stories:
- China’s solar panel policy at the core of energy transition in South Asia
- Villages in Sindh light up with solar power
- [Interview] India needs to tweak its policies to promote solar energy growth: Tim Buckley
- ‘Chinese PV price drop has enabled us to sell power at cheaper rate than national grid’
- 原商务部副部长：中资企业依赖银行贷款“走出去”的风险在加大
We hope to continue bringing reporters together to build on these connections in the years ahead. We also welcome journalists interested in covering what increasingly seems like the story of our time to register with our network here.
(Banner photo: Installation of solar photovoltaic panels on a roof in China. Credit Jiri Rezac/The Climate Group/CC)