What the evidence shows

Tanzanian journalists across beats—not only those on environment desks—face persistent challenges when covering climate change, which impacts the accuracy, reach, and accountability of their reporting. Practical, newsroom-oriented support helps reporters identify climate dimensions within everyday stories and integrate them into existing workflows.

Findings highlight that core challenges include confusion between weather and climate, overreliance on technical jargon that alienates audiences, and limited audience-aware framing. At the same time, evidence from local case studies and practitioner testimony demonstrates that storytelling approaches—such as human-centered narratives, inclusion of underrepresented voices, and the strategic use of visuals, sound, and data—significantly improve audience engagement and comprehension.

The evidence underscores that reporting on climate issues in Tanzania carries distinct physical, digital, and legal risks. Journalists require clearer guidance on their rights, as well as practical safety protocols tailored to the local context.

The toolkit blends conceptual guidance with real Tanzanian case studies, direct quotes from local journalists, interactive exercises with answer keys, and extensive linked resources — positioning it as a hands-on training resource rather than an academic or evidentiary report.

Key Findings

• A survey cited in the toolkit found two-thirds of East African journalists still 'balance' climate stories by including sources skeptical of human-caused climate change alongside those confirming the scientific consensus — a practice the toolkit identifies as "false balance" that misrepresents where scientific consensus actually stands.

• An investigation by the African Digital Democracy Observatory identified three dominant false climate narratives circulating in Tanzania: denial narratives (framing climate change as a hoax or Western agenda), displacement narratives (blaming only local causes like deforestation without wider climate context), and religious/spiritual narratives (framing disasters as divine punishment).

• Mis- and disinformation about climate change tends to spike specifically around severe weather events and international climate conferences, when chaotic conditions and vested-interest actors make false information more likely to spread and harder to verify.

Stand-out data points

• 38%: share of Tanzanians who have even heard the term "climate change," per 2025 Afrobarometer data.

• 2.6 million: projected additional Tanzanians pushed into poverty by 2050 due to climate change impacts, per World Bank estimates.Examples of how Understories uses this research.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Emotional resonance Supports the value of humanizing stories through named individuals and lived experience (e.g., the Maasai women case study) as a route to audience connection.

• Hope doom balance The toolkit explicitly warns that "dystopian headlines... can be counterproductive" and leave audiences "feeling disempowered and helpless”.

• Solution focus Strongly supports scoring "constructive journalism" framing — offering forward-looking, solutions-oriented angles rather than only dystopian framing — as more engaging and less disempowering for audiences.

• Beneficence The toolkit's entire purpose is equipping under-resourced journalists to inform and empower audiences. 

• Justice: The toolkit addresses "missing voices" (gender, ordinary people vs. officials, marginalized groups) as an equity issue in storytelling — relevant to the justice lens on whose voices are centered in climate messaging. Geographically, its applicability is specific to Tanzania and East Africa.

— non exhaustive.

Key quote

“The first level is general safety. The second layer of risk assessment can involve outside factors. The third level of security is likely to involve maybe security forces." - Hassan Mhelela, chief editor at Azam TV, on layered risk assessment for journalists in the field.

© No copyright notice, should not be assumed public domain or freely reproducible without checking with Thomson Foundation directly.

Last update: 23 July 2026

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