"Floods are hard to cover when the road is washed out."
"It was December, a time of the year when the Iraqi climate usually delivers cool, relatively clear skies. But on that particular day in 2017, as on so many others in recent years, the weather gods had very different plans in mind. As we left Baghdad, the air assumed a heavy, yellowish tint. An hour later, it was a dull orange—and blustery enough to season our food with a fine patina of sand when we sat down for lunch at a roadside canteen. Over the rest of the afternoon, and through this most unseasonable of sandstorms, visibility dropped to such a point that even our driver, a man who saw speed bumps as personal affronts, felt it wise to slow to a crawl.
I had come to these parts to report on the unpredictable conditions that farmers face, and here was a very topical, if intensely inconvenient, case in point. We couldn’t identify the turnoff to a few of the villages on our agenda. We couldn’t find an interviewee’s house. By the time we slunk back into the capital that evening, bringing much of the desert with us, it was probably just as well we’d missed our meetings with the stickler-for-appearances-officials I had painstakingly scheduled.
Climate change is replete with brutal ironies. To those must be added the ways in which climate is increasingly sabotaging journalists’ attempts to cover it. Places are being rendered inaccessible by extreme weather events. Gear is failing or breaking or simply proving unfit for purpose in tougher conditions. In this sometimes literal morass of mud and mind-boggling temperatures, this all-important story is getting harder to tell.
In discussions with a dozen journalists on four continents, I’ve heard frequent accounts of how climate stifles coverage."
Peter Schwartzstein reports for Columbia Journalism Review April 22, 2025.
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