ENVIRONMENT: Sustainable Development – What’s the Real Story?

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 20 1996 (IPS) - Latin American journalists are writing many stories about sustainable development issues — but their focus on the sensational and controversial impede full understanding of the concept, say people active in the field.

“The press treats the idea of sustainable development with little depth. It only reports on catastrophes, like the death of fish or chemical contamination from a plant,” said Diana Pombo, of the Institute for Environmental Policy in Colombia.

“They don’t consider issues of development to be newsworthy, because they are slower, more gradual and complex processes, and it’s not easy to find journalists who are willing to study these more structural subjects,” she added.

Claudio Bertonatti of the Wildlife Foundation of Argentina said for many journalists environmental issues are often synonymous with catastrophe: they make little attempt to explore the concept and possibilities of sustainable development.

Their comments on sustaintable development — a concept which promotes economic development in a manner comptatible with the preservation of natural resources — were obtained by IPS in a mini- survey ahead of a special seminar on the matter.

Called the “Journalism Summit on Sustainable Development”, it is scheduled for the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este between Nov 23-24. The Ecos Foundation are sponsors of the meeting which will be attended by the bosses of the region’s main media houses.

In the survey, leaders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) said the press treated environmental issues in a superficial way and even with a certain degree of sensationalism because they misunderstood the concept of sustainable development.

Margarita Flores of the Latin American Institute for Legal Services said the idea of sustainable development was becoming more widely known but it was still very new and often distorted.

“Journalists tend to convey a sense of disaster when it comes to the environment, and that, instead of creating an awareness, ends up overwhelming the citizen’s capacity to respond,” she argued.

Flores also pointed out that this type of treatment tended to generate inadequate individual responses because “if there is one subject which requires a global vision, it is the environment.”

“There must be a better understanding of the concept of development, and then sustainability, because, for some, ‘sustainable’ is like a label which is added onto ‘development,’ without really changing the economic model,” she noted.

Bertonatti agreed that there was much confusion regarding sustainable development. This confusion was reflected in the media: “If one does an analysis of the clippings, one can observe that one day, in any one newspaper, there are articles that contradict each other.”

He pointed to the example of an article in the economics section of a newspaper which announced a multi-million dollar investment in a mining project without offering any observations about is environmental impact. In another section, the same newspaper reported on the consequences of a previous mining project on the local population.

“The information is haphazard, inconsistent and deficient. But it’s not the journalists’ fault, because they are often inadequately informed on the subject. Rather, it reflects the general state of confusion over this new concept of development,” said Bertonatti.

“What most people want to hear is that animals are not being killed and that trees are not being cut down, but that is not realistic. Only certain scarce resources should be preserved, and abundant ones should be handled in sustainable ways; but we see that the public that is informed about ecology believes that it is necessary to protect everything,” he observed.

Juana Castano, of the World Union for the Conservation of Nature, believes that what is needed is more and better quality information, and above all, a less negative treatment of environmental issues.

“Unfortunately, it is more newsworthy to report how we are destroying the environment than to report on successful programmes, of which there are many in order to demonstrate what sustainable development really is,” she said.

“It could be the fault of the journalists, of the owners of the media, of the environmental leaders or public opinion. It’s a little bit everyone’s fault, because we have become accustomed to only hearing the bad news, and we never hear anything about what can be done,” she concluded.

At the ‘Summit’, media directors will join communications experts in to analyze these topics and draw up a document to present to the region’s presidents during the Summit of the Americas on Sustainable Development, which will take place in December in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.