Sanket Jain has won a gold medal from the United Nations Correspondents Association in part for a story he wrote for Yale Climate Connections this year about how extreme heat is harming children’s education worldwide.
Jain spends most of his time in India’s countryside, where he reports on climate change and its impact on rural communities and public health. Yale Climate Connections sat down with him to talk about what it took to win this prestigious award and how he gets his stories.
Interview edited and condensed.
Yale Climate Connections: How did you come across this story, and what motivated you to write it?
Sanket Jain: This story started with a very simple clue, because when I was [reporting] in the field, I looked at a girl’s grades, and I found that every summer her grades would come down. And at first, everyone brushed it off. They said that it was just a phase. But when I started looking at the grades year after year, I found that her grades would come down every summer, and every winter they would bounce back. So it was quite strange for me. And I thought, something is wrong about this.
So I started digging deeper, and I met some of her friends. And that’s how I came across the records of 40 students at the village, and all of them were suffering from the same problem. And that’s when I realized, “Hey, something is definitely wrong here, because it can’t be a coincidence that everyone’s grades are dropping every summer and they’re coming back every winter.”
So I started talking to teachers. I started talking to a lot of community health care workers, but I couldn’t find any concrete leads there. So I started visiting nearby villages, and I tracked, I think, more than 15 villages, and I spoke to hundreds of students, and I found a similar pattern everywhere.
It was disturbing me because it can’t be a coincidence anymore, right? So I started tracking temperature, and I started tracking their performance. And that’s when I found that, hey, there is a link between these two topics. I started writing to a lot of scientists, a lot of doctors, and a few people had carried out research on this. It was in small places with smaller sample sizes, but they did carry out research. And that’s when they told me, “You know, what? Extreme heat does play a role. It does affect children’s ability to learn, focus, and memorize things.”
YCC: So it all started with this one girl. Who was she? How did you know her?
Jain: I report from places where no one wants to go. I report from remote villages. So, I was there [Dhakale] for another story. I was just talking to her parents, I was just talking to her neighbors, and that’s how I just chanced upon her grade sheet.
YCC: What got you into reporting on climate change and the environment?
Jain: For the past nine years, I’ve been reporting from remote villages, and I was asking questions which no one was asking before. I would ask a very simple question: “What would happen to a farmer’s body when the temperature would rise just half a degree?” I’m in the field for a longer period of time. I would come across many anecdotes. And one of the anecdotes was so many women were falling – just simple falls would lead to major fractures. There was something behind it, and I had to find it out.
So that’s when I started looking deeper into these kinds of questions. And that’s why I got into reporting about climate change, about the environment. One of the questions I always have is, “What is climate change doing to our bodies?”
My goal has been to break down complicated science into simple language, into something which millions of people can understand, because this is something which is affecting everyone in the world, right?
YCC: What made you start reporting from rural areas?
Jain: When I was pursuing my journalism course, we were all taught about how to write for mainstream media, but something about it didn’t click with me. I was a crime reporter as an intern in India’s national capital, New Delhi. I absolutely hated it. I didn’t like reporting about crime. I didn’t like reporting from mainstream places.
I come from a very small town. There are no stories from my town. When you look at numbers, India roughly has 833 million people staying in villages. That’s 70% of India’s population. And 70% of the population is not making news. So definitely there is something wrong with this entire matrix, right? So that’s when I realized, you know what? Let’s go back to my hometown, and let’s start traveling to villages to figure out what’s happening there.
YCC: This prize is very much deserved. How did you feel when you heard that you were the recipient?
Jain: I was very happy, but more than the happiness, I had achieved something because these stories are not reported in the mainstream media. Look at climate coverage in many mainstream publications: You will see stories of storms. You will see stories of floods, heat waves, but no one is trying to look at the bigger picture. How are these realities unfolding? Everyone thinks climate change is a sudden reality, like it has exploded.
These kinds of stories make news. But the slow realities don’t make news. I call this a crisis exploding in very slow motion.
So obviously, getting this award meant that there is this space for these stories, and also it’s recognized at a much larger scale. I felt very happy about it because also it’s a way of honoring the people whose lives are affected before the world takes notice.
YCC: Are there other stories that you would like to see covered, and what sort of stories would you like to cover personally?
Jain: Personally, one of my goals is to cover what extreme heat is doing to our bodies, not just looking at the obvious: We are not able to sleep properly. It’s affecting how we are thinking.
I also want to look at the bigger picture. Let’s say you are exposed to heat for four or five years. What does it do to your body over the long run? Can it lead to chronic diseases? I want to explore these kinds of realities now, because this is something which has already affected millions of people, and no one is out there documenting it.
YCC: The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the publisher of Yale Climate Connections, released a Climate Opinions Map for India recently. I’m sure you’ve been looking at that data. Is there anything that surprises you, or did it pretty much fall in line with what you were seeing out in the field? Two major findings were that the majority of Indians think global warming is affecting extreme weather events, and 96% of Indians think global warming is happening.
Jain: Yes. So those reports are very helpful, and these reports are very thorough, I must say, because I meet thousands of people. I meet people from remote villages – all of them do care about climate change because it’s something which affects them every day. They are not using the word climate change, but they’re using some other terms in their local languages.
YCC: How many different languages do you speak?
Jain: I personally speak five languages.
YCC: Is it hard sometimes to find the words to describe these very scientific and abstract concepts?
Jain: One of the challenges in reporting from India is every 20 to 30 kilometers, the language changes. Even if you have the same language, the dialect will differ. So the kind of things they’re trying to say and the kind of things which we are understanding, sometimes it can be totally wrong. You’re not missing it by a small margin. You’re missing it completely. That’s how big a difference it can make.
One of the strategies I use is that I stay in that place for a good amount of time. I make friends in those areas so that I have a good connection with people there. And once I go interview people, I make sure that there are locals with me because I’m cross-checking every time, whenever they are saying something, and whenever I’m taking notes, I’m making sure that I’m getting it right.
YCC: Do you think that sometimes the issue with reporting in general is that for these larger news organizations, oftentimes they have somebody kind of parachute in, tell a story, and then leave without fully understanding the community that they’re reporting on?
Jain: Exactly. A majority of climate stories are covered like that: A journalist would parachute from a bigger city, or from some other country, and they would just interview four or five people, and they would just write their story, interview a few experts, copy-paste a few research papers, and it’s done.
Getting emotional context right in climate change reporting is very difficult. And you can do it only if you spend a lot of time with them. So when I’m writing about, let’s say, heat waves and what it’s doing to our brains, it’s something which has affected me in the past because I was out there. I spent 10 hours in extreme heat. I thought it would do nothing to my body. And once I was back in my hometown, I was down with fever for a good 20 days.
YCC: In this political environment that we’re living in, newsrooms are closing their climate divisions. Is it hard at times being out in the field and reporting these climate-related stories?
Jain: The kind of stories I’m doing, it’s really very difficult to get them out in the world. One of the bigger problems is that a lot of the newsroom’s budget is being slashed. A lot of climate editors have lost their jobs. So who are you going to pitch these stories to? That’s one of the problems. The problem is, not many editors are used to looking at climate stories this way because everyone is interested in striking visuals, in big numbers, like how many people lost their lives? How many acres of land have been devastated? So they’re not ready to look at this slow reality, which has become a part of everyday life.
So it’s obviously very difficult to get these stories placed. And the kind of stories I do, it takes a lot of time to do these stories. So let’s say I’m pitching the story today to an editor. I’ve already done the work [in the field] for the past, let’s say, 12 or 13 months.
These stories are very often dismissed as anecdotal evidence. A lot of editors tell me, “You know what? This is just one person feeling that way. So how can we come to a conclusion that this is a problem which affects millions of people?” So I need to bring in that kind of data. I need to look for expert voices. I need to look for scientists who are working on this, which is very difficult. And many times, scientists are not open to talking about this, so that adds another layer of challenges to it.
YCC: One thing that we’ve found is that news organizations are very much interested in covering the immediate impacts of, like you said, the death toll, all of that, the visuals of that extreme weather event. But then that death toll continues for months, if not years, after that extreme weather event, and the news spotlight has gone away in that time. It’s very hard to keep the spotlight on those areas that really need it in the months after. So I was just thinking about that as you, as you were talking. Thank you so much for what you’re doing. And we love all the stories that you’ve done for us.
I’ve seen from an outside perspective a lot of things that are happening in India in terms of renewable energy. What are your thoughts about the steps the country has taken to lower emissions?
Jain: Renewable energy and transitioning to green energy is obviously a very big thing in India. It’s booming up very rapidly, but still, we are not quite there. It’s obviously very slow at this stage, but it’s still far better when we are looking at other countries, especially where there is complete climate change denial. In India, people do believe in climate change because more than 70% of the country is affected by it. You look at any point of the year, and there will be a flood in the country. So it’s getting much worse every year.
So people do believe in it, and a lot of people have actually adopted solar energy in India. So we are getting there.
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Great Job Pearl Marvell & the Team @ Yale Climate Connections Source link for sharing this story.
