How an environmental journalist's investigation overcame government denial of disappearing islands

Journalist Subhransu Priyadarshini was on vacation in Eastern India when she first noticed the “vanishing islands.” There in the Sundarbans, in the Bay of Bengal, people had been forced off land as it became submerged under water.

She found that government records revealed little about the crisis in the Sundarbans, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The government denied that islands had been submerged due to climate change, maintaining that land erosion and accretion were natural phenomena and that there was no evidence of sea-level rise.

Surprised to learn nothing had been published on the phenomenon outside academic research, Priyadarshini began to ask questions. She found that scientists had forecast a dozen islands would disappear within the next decade due to rising sea levels, threatening one of Earth’s major tiger habitats. Thousands of people had already fled their homes.

“Through my investigations, the evidence emerged loud and clear,” Priyadarshini said. “Two islands had indeed submerged – slowly first and rapidly over the last three decades.”

Her reporting made an impact: the government admitted publicly that climate change is a reality in the Sundarbans. The islands and their habitat continue to be covered by a range of media, including The Guardian. This year, the state government of West Bengal published a report exploring climate change’s underlying threat to the delta region, along with a climate change action plan.

Priyadarshini had this advice for journalists conducting investigations into scientific topics:

• Peer review is important but not everything. It’s important to get all sides of the story, from sources including NGOs, politicians, companies and affected people.
• Sources can include: peer-reviewed publications, conferences, lab reports, national communications, e-mail alerts, scientists’ unions or associations, and even disgruntled researchers within the scientific establishment.
• When dealing with statistics, data and images: Geologists and climate scientists often talk in terms of very long time periods such as centuries or millenia. One has to humanize those numbers and figures, by using percents, averages, rates, data expressed in terms of decades and satellite figures.
• Stay away from pseudoscience. Lists of which journals are more or less reliable are available here and here.
• It is important to report science policy, since this is the facet of science that looks at how science affects the people involved.
• A good resource for using science for investigative journalism available from the World Federation of Science Journalists.

Sources: UNESCO, The Guardian

Lea Kaplja and Stanislava Antova