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Solutions Journalism for Coastal Communities: Key Takeaways for Journalists Reporting on Resilience

25 Apr, 2024
A picture of seagrass

37% of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of a coastline. Rising seas and increasingly severe storm surges could cost urban coastal areas more than US$1 trillion a year by 2050. Communities globally are already facing severe coastal impacts as climate change accelerates, from increasingly severe storm and flood events and shoreline erosion to the destruction of coastal biodiversity that protects against those storm events, such as mangroves and coral reefs.  

 These issues and the many other devastating impacts of climate change can feel overwhelming, especially in a chaotic news cycle with near-constant reports of the alarming trajectory brought by increasing emissions and intensifying disasters.  

 Yet audiences are craving solutions: In a 2024 study, behavioral scientists tested how the most common messages about climate change intended to change beliefs and boost action worked with people in 63 different countries. The study found that "climate doomerism" when negative messages (such as the first paragraph of this tipsheet!) are used, was one of the least effective at changing people’s beliefs and the worst for motivating action. In the study, it notes that this ‘doom and gloom’ style of information made people less likely to take climate action.  

 Other studies echo these findings. A 2017 publication from the Solutions Journalism Network found similar results: Solutions-focused news increases optimism, empowerment and the amount of connectedness people feel toward their community.  

 In a nutshell, for a greater chance of impact, journalists should be telling more stories of resilience and highlighting successful adaptation and mitigation efforts. In the case of coastal climate impacts, better media coverage amplifying coastal resilience will be key to driving climate action. The term “coastal resilience” refers to a community’s ability to bounce back, or bounce forward, after experiencing a hazardous event, such as a hurricane, coastal storm, flooding and more.  

“We, as journalists, need to go past merely reporting on climate disasters when they hit. We need to help our audience better understand what makes cities vulnerable and what can be done to help them recover better from major climate events.”  

— Laura Grant, Data Journalist, The Outlier.  Read The Outlier’s EJN-supported investigation “A Perfect Storm” about Durban's flood vulnerability.

Journalists play a major role in identifying and informing their audiences about potential solutions around the world, including ones designed to boost the adaptive capacity of coastal communities most at risk. But solutions journalism goes beyond that: It also must shed light on the challenges or mismanagement of solutions that fail to achieve their outcomes for climate resilience. 

 But how do we do that?  

 In this tipsheet, which aggregates tips from EJN’s 2023 virtual workshop on coastal resilience, as well as from a variety of experts and primary sources, journalists will learn the basics of solutions journalism and how to apply it to coastal stories. We’ll look at what makes a solutions story and use the topic of coastal resilience to explore solutions journalism approaches and angles. Come prepared with your own ideas to workshop as you keep reading! 

What is solutions journalism? 

The Solutions Journalism Network, an excellent resource for all things solutions journalism, says this: 

“Solutions journalism investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, how people try to solve widely shared problems. While journalists usually define news as ‘what’s gone wrong,’ solutions journalism tries to expand that definition: responses to problems are also newsworthy ... Solutions stories don’t celebrate responses to problems, or advocate for specific ones; they cover them, investigating what was done and what the evidence says worked and didn’t work about it, and why. They report on the limitations of a response.” 

a checklist with various steps
Part of a visual Solutions Journalism Checklist by Solutions Journalism Network / Credit: Solutions Journalism Network. 

What are the key components of a solutions story? 

 As journalist and Solutions Journalism Network co-founder David Bornstein said in a 2015 Nieman Reports article: Solutions journalism is not “good news for good news’ sake. Stories have to pass a threshold to qualify as solutions journalism. At a minimum, they need to identify social ills and potential remedies to them. They need to include the voices of people who have seen those remedies at the ground level. They must include evidence about whether the remedies work, and report any caveats or limitations associated with them."  

Slide from Ruona Meyer’s presentation during an EJN workshop / Credit: Ruona Meyer

These are the four pillars of solutions journalism, which Ruona Meyer, Africa Initiative Manager at the Solutions Journalism Network, shared more about these four pillars of solutions journalism at an EJN media training workshop:

  1. ✅RESPONSE: There must be a tangible response to a specific problem. While many solutions stories cover successful responses, failed responses are still solutions reporting, and are worthy of coverage. Even in the absence of success, an attempt to respond can provide important lessons for others. 
  2. ✅ EVIDENCE: There must be evidence of that response, such as qualitative data (testimony from people) or quantitative data (numbers).  
  3. ✅ INSIGHTS: The solutions story must include approaches that can be replicated (if successful) or lessons others can learn from (if unsuccessful). The audience should come away with a better understanding of both the specific problem(s), and an example (or more) of how it can be addressed. 
  4. ✅ LIMITATIONS: This is the most important pillar of a solutions story. No response, even if it was successful, is without limitations. Without including this element, you run the risk of writing a PR story that does not robustly explore the solution from all angles. 

To summarize, she said: “A solutions story is about a response to a problem, not just the problem. It shows the evidence, it has to include insights and approaches others can learn from…and of course you have to think of limitations.”  

Meyer reminds journalists that it’s an approach that reporters on all beats can utilize. Underscoring the importance of pillar 4, she explained that it’s important that the approach is critical. The word ‘critical’ is key in solutions journalism, as a solutions approach should include a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness and feasibility of a response, covering both its potential and limitations.  

Tip for journalists: Are you interested in telling solutions stories about climate finance — or the lack of — to support resilience and adaptation projects in coastal communities? Check out EJN’s tipsheet on covering climate finance for coastal resilience, which explains how climate finance works, provides an in-depth look at international commitments and explores potential story themes. What story ideas can you glean from that tipsheet that would center solutions?  

Case studies of coastal resilience 

Stories focused on climate and coastal resilience are the perfect opportunity for journalists to pivot into solutions-driven reporting because they lend themselves well to a solutions approach, for several reasons:  

  1. For most coastal communities in the world, climate change is a constant threat — and a threat multiplier, and solutions are urgently needed; 
  2. Communities are already innovating, changing, adapting and the insights they are learning — and the mistakes they’re making — could inform and inspire others in another part of the country or world; 
  3. When communities have proof that routes of action do or don’t work, they can hold policymakers and polluters accountable and put pressure on them to act.  

A case study in Narikoso, Fiji:

Two individuals sitting talking with each other
Journalist Stanley Simpson interviewing a source in Narikoso during his reporting trip / Credit: Stanley Simpson. 

For 10 years, the people of Narikoso — a coastal village in Fiji — waited, enduring sea level rise that threatened their homes. Despite being one of 40 villages identified by the Fijian government for relocation due to climate change, Narikoso residents remained in limbo since 2011 when the government first discussed mitigation and adaptation efforts for the community. 

Fijian journalist and EJN grantee, Stanley Simpson, first heard of Narikoso’s story in September 2020 while reporting on successful relocations in other parts of the country. His article shed light on the bureaucratic delays, policy changes and environmental damage that had hindered the resettlement process. This caught the attention of Fijian officials, including then-Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, and in November 2020, Bainimarama officially inaugurated Narikoso’s relocation area. 

While Simpson's story may not seem like a traditional solutions story, he was investigating a solution — just one that hadn't gone as planned. Stories like this are equally important to draw attention to initiatives that are designed to boost resilience but are mired in implementation or other challenges. 

Tip for journalists: Successful solutions stories like this one go beyond just describing the challenges, and instead deeply explore every angle of the possible solutions. In your stories, can you think about how to be critical and objective about the limitations of the solution? Can you identify and explain obstacles that might get in the way of other areas replicating the solution or scaling it across multiple communities, as well as possible solutions for those obstacles? Can you find sources who aren’t convinced that this is the right solution, along with those who are, and include alternatives that experts have suggested? 

Digging deeper into the Four Pillars 

Using some additional examples, let’s dig into the four pillars of solutions journalism that Meyer explored in her presentation: 

Story 1: Mangrove Forests Could Disappear by 2050 if Emissions Aren’t Cut 

  1. Response: 🚫 No. The story focuses on the negative impact of sea level rise on mangrove forests globally. 
  2. Evidence: 🚫 No. While studies about the importance of mangroves – and their disappearance – are included, there is no evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of any responses. 
  3. Insights: 🚫No. The story mentions inaction but no insight or lesson about how to conserve or protect mangroves. 
  4. Limitations: 🚫 No. The story does not examine any solutions or limitations to those solutions. 

Story 2: Communities in Colombia's San Andrés Archipelago Restore Mangroves as Storms Increase 

  1. Response: ✅ Yes. The story focuses on the results of community-led initiatives in Colombia’s San Andrés archipelago to restore mangrove forests. 
  2. Evidence: ✅ Yes. The story includes interviews with community members leading the response, as well as photographic evidence of their restoration efforts and data about their achievements so far. 
  3. Insights: ✅ Yes. The story discusses the participatory mangrove conservation initiatives being undertaken by community members and their growth. 
  4. Limitations: ✅ Yes. The story addresses budget limitations imposed by the government, as well as the lack of political will to support projects like the participatory restoration initiative except when disaster strikes.   

Tip for journalists: Use these four pillars to organize your research for a story idea, or as a checklist when editing your story. Have you bolstered all four pillars in your story? If not, what pillars are you missing and what additional sources might fill in the gaps? 

A solutions story is not… 

🚫A plan or a theory, like the pledge to protect Liberia’s Forest covered in Front Page Africa. It is about a response that is already happening, like the butterfly farming initiative reported in Mongabay. It would be difficult to obtain any meaningful evidence, insights, or limitations from a plan or a theory. 

A slide from a presentation
Slide from Ruona Meyer’s presentation during an EJN workshop / Credit: Ruona Meyer. 

🚫 One person’s heroic acts, like the Nigerian doctor who saved a woman’s life in the article in the image below. It is about collaborative efforts to drive systemic change, as seen in the Reuters article. Driving systemic change means contributing to a comprehensive and structured shift in fundamental aspects of a system or organization, often involving changes to policy, processes and practices to address underlying issues.  

A presentation slide
Slide from Ruona Meyer’s presentation during an EJN workshop / Credit: Ruona Meyer. 

🚫 Activism or campaigns, like Eyewitness News’ story of Trevor Noah’s broad education campaign. Reporters skeptical about reporting on solutions are often concerned that their stories will blur the line between advocacy and journalism. On the contrary, journalists who report on solutions should continue to uphold journalistic integrity and avoid becoming a mouthpiece for any particular solution, cause or political party. 

When reporting on campaigns, remember that advocacy for a certain solution is a means to an end, it is not the solution in and of itself. The solution you cover should be more tangible than merely raising awareness through a campaign and must be more objective and critical than an unequivocal advocate for that solution would be. Consider Al-Fanar Media’s article about improving education at school with phones — the response is a tangible initiative to improve the quality of local schools and encourage attendance through a communications campaign. The article addresses how the initiative works, who it supports and its challenges — such as lack of funding — that the local government is working to address.  

Slide from Ruona Meyer’s presentation during an EJN workshop / Credit: Ruona Meyer

Tip: If you are writing about a campaign and want to turn it into solutions journalism, consider if the campaign points to any examples of successful actions or evidence for why the campaign is justified. Can you dive into one of those examples as a story? For example, this story about a citizen-led campaign to clean a river in Kathmandu focuses not just on the campaign itself, but the activities that have resulted from it — such as thousands of people showing up to clean the river each week, which had a huge impact on its restoration, but also became an unmanageable number of volunteers. 

Finding solutions angles to your stories  

Now that we’ve clarified what solutions stories are and aren’t, how can journalists effectively transition from problem-centric narratives to in-depth coverage of solutions?  

Meyer offered a few ideas with this slide in her presentation, though she noted this is not an exhaustive list.  

A workshop presentation slide.
Slide from Ruona Meyer’s presentation during an EJN workshop / Credit: Ruona Meyer. 

Let’s walk through a few more in-depth examples. Do you think these stories touch on all four pillars of solutions journalism: Response, Evidence, Insights and Limitations? 

Problem: Mangrove loss. Let’s say you want to write a story about declining mangroves along your country’s coastline–a well reported issue. How can you delve deeper and take a solutions approach? 

Tip: Research government, environmental, fishing or coastal tourism groups to see if any of them are taking action to restore or protect mangroves and focus on the successes and limitations of their project. 

Example solution: Women-led restoration efforts in El Salvador. In 2022, EJN grantee Julian Reingold covered mangrove loss and conservation efforts in El Salvador as part of EJN’s Covering Coastal Resilience project. He covers a specific response, and in telling that story he necessarily provides background about the problem. This story highlights a grassroots restoration effort as a model for creating new livelihoods and protecting biodiversity, despite challenges in funding and gender biases. 

Problem: Invasive coastal species. Let’s say you want to report on the declining population of an important species in your community due to the presence of an invasive species. How could you take a solutions approach? 

Tip: Look for innovative solutions, not only those that seek to remove the species through traditional methods. Are communities shifting their fishing habits or techniques?  

Example solution: Community-driven approaches such as traps, public subsidies and more. Grantee Aïda Delpuech’s story about the invasion of blue crabs in the Gulf of Gabes, Tunisia, includes several solutions to the problem. These include community-driven approaches, such as innovative traps by local fishers, to more systemic interventions like public subsidies, training for fishers to process blue crabs for export, and the establishment of Marine Protected Areas to safeguard the ecosystem and sustain the blue cab industry. Delpuech provides qualitative evidence in her story that these solutions have helped mitigate the initial challenges posed by the invasive species while also providing economic opportunities for the local community. 

Problem: Coastal erosion. There are a lot of stories about disappearing beaches and shorelines and flooded coastal homes. But where are solutions emerging that you could report on? 

Tip: Depending on where you are, a lot of coastal defense programs are run by governments with foreign aid, including with climate finance from institutions like the World Bank. Inquire with officials about active or past projects and the data they’ve collected, or submit a Freedom of Information request.  

Example solution: The West Africa Coastal Areas Program. Grantee Ange Banouwin wrote a solutions piece on the West Africa Coastal Areas Program’s cross-border project aimed at protecting victims of coastal erosion. In the story, Banouwin critically examines the initiative by highlighting the challenges and delays in its implementation, as perceived by the affected communities. This is a good example of a solutions story that focuses on the limitations of a particular project.  

Tip for journalists: For any solution, it is important to be critical of whether the solution has actually benefited those most threatened by the environmental problem. Always consider who is most impacted and who is most vulnerable. Are there tradeoffs (does the solution help some members of the community and hurt others)? For example, beach restoration or seawalls designed to prevent erosion can impact other adjacent beaches downstream by changing wave patterns; while issues involving transboundary rivers can have impacts upstream and downstream depending on where the solution was implemented. Find direct sources to interview among those groups and ask for their honest assessment of the solution. Your story should include data and research findings in addition to their anecdotal evidence. Consider both community and scientific expertise when reporting on how the solution could be improved. 

A list of steps.
An infographic with a six-step process to creating a solutions story by Solutions Journalism Network / Credit: Solutions Journalism Network. 

Exercise: Turn your story ideas into solutions journalism   

Use the following questions as prompts: 

  1. Jot down a few environmental problems facing coastal communities or ecosystems near you. 
  2. Is anyone addressing this problem? Who are they? Which other stakeholders should be responding to this issue – and are they?  
  3. Who is most impacted by this attempt to address the problem, and what do they say about the response’s success or limitations?  
  4. What evidence exists to show the impact before and after this solution was implemented? 
  5. Does your story demonstrate how this solution is scalable or replicable? Are there similar ecosystems or communities at risk that could learn from the insights gleaned from these efforts? 

Resources 

Examples of solutions journalism (on coastal resilience and beyond)   

For more solutions stories, check out the Solutions Journalism Story Tracker. 

This tipsheet was produced by Caroline Rothery and Lucienne Noel with input from Hannah Bernstein and Amrita Gupta.

 Banner image: Seagrass sways in the current off the coast of Formentera, Spain / Credit: Manu San Felix. 

Climate Change Natural Disasters Oceans & Coasts Policies & Conventions
Tags: Coastal resilience Climate change Climate Adaptation