Climate Arena is a young, multidisciplinary climate journalism conference which creates space for experts from all domains to meet, share knowledge and expertise, and build collaborations.
Whether you are a freelance or staff journalist, scientist, academic, researcher at a not-for-profit organisation, technologist, data nerd or anything in between — we would be delighted to hear from you and learn more about your climate research and the methods behind it.
We want you to share your investigations and findings but more importantly your resources, methods, experiences and your lessons learned, so others can build on what has already been achieved.
For everyone used to coming to Dataharvest — the European Investigative Journalism Conference, we are looking for similar hands-on approaches to sessions, workshops and panel discussions. For all of you who are new to Arena conferences, please take a look at the guidelines below and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
The call for proposals is open until 12 April 2024.
Here are a few tips if you’re considering pitching a session:
- Please don’t limit yourself to “climate stories”. The climate crisis and environmental issues are all interconnected to all kinds of other fields of research and investigations. Don’t hesitate to surprise us!
- Think methodology, not content: Tell us HOW you did something, rather than WHAT you did. For example, don’t pitch “We unveiled a dodgy pensions scheme” – instead pitch “Climate-killing funds: how to investigate pension investments”. Be concrete and instructive, so colleagues can learn from your experience.
- Do you have a (nerdy) skill or a helpful tool? We are interested in those! You can pitch us a session/workshop about teaching a specific OSINT skill, a visualization tool you want to showcase, or a database that you put together others could benefit from.
- Not everything has to be directly connected to the climate or the environment — that goes especially for hands-on workshops around skills. Maybe you have worked in a specific way on an unrelated topic but you see the potential for this method, tool, database, archive, creative storytelling or much more to be used for climate investigations.
- Please be as detailed as possible. We can work together and shape your initial idea, but please explain your proposal in more detail than “using OSINT in climate crisis context”. Explain what the audience will get out of your session, and let us know what your particular expertise or connection is within the topic.
- Think European. Climate Arena is a meeting space for journalists and experts from all over the continent. Stories may take place outside of Europe, but they need to have a European connection. We describe “Europe” very widely (46 European Council countries).
- From national research to European collaboration. You may have a great national investigation on a topic that is equally relevant in other countries. Pitch this kind of session as an “instant inspiration” session where you explain to others how they can do they same on their home turf.
- Your pitch can be academic or scientific — only please dumb it down for us: We don’t have many general debates and presentations of scientific papers about the climate crisis or climate journalism, but we are looking for academic work that journalists can work with or learn from, or insights and possibilities about collaborations between journalists and scientists.
The Climate Arena team is small, but passionate. We are all first and foremost journalists and embedded in the investigative, cross-border and data journalism community, and seek to offer great content that appeals to and is useful for others in the community.
We rely on your ideas and engagement to create a successful conference. Thank you for helping us out!
