08/09/2026
Beyond disasters: Rethinking how Bhutan tells its climate story
Two-day workshop in Paro seeks to strengthen evidence-based, GESI-responsive reporting on climate adaptation and community resilience
PARO, September 8 โ As Bhutan faces changing rainfall patterns, drying water sources, increasing water scarcity and growing pressure on rural livelihoods, journalists will gather in Paro tomorrow to examine a question that is becoming increasingly important: how should climate change be reported when its effects are often slow, complex and deeply unequal?
A two-day GESI-responsive Climate Storytelling Workshop for Bhutanese journalists will begin on September 9 at Terma Linca, Paro. The workshop is being organised by the Tarayana Foundation in collaboration with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), with support from Global Affairs Canada (GAC).
The workshop comes at a time when climate change is no longer a distant environmental issue for Bhutan. Its consequences are increasingly being felt in the places where people live and workโfrom changes in water availability and agriculture to threats to biodiversity and the livelihoods of communities dependent on natural resources.
Yet much of climate reporting still risks becoming a story about events rather than people.
A flood, landslide, drought or changing rainfall pattern can make headlines. But what happens after the cameras leave is often less visible: a farmer changing what to plant, a community protecting a spring, women spending more time securing water, young people looking for alternatives to traditional livelihoods, or local communities adapting practices that have evolved over generations.
This is where climate storytelling becomes important.
According to the organisers, the workshop will introduce journalists to the Integrated Climate Adaptation Solutions for the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HI-CAS) project, which is being implemented in Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal. In Bhutan, Tarayana Foundation is implementing the project with national and local partners, focusing on community-led and gender-responsive approaches to climate adaptation.
The project promotes what it calls Integrated Adaptation Solutions Packages, combining springshed management, agrobiodiversity conservation, renewable energy, and gender equality and social inclusion.
For journalists, however, the challenge is not simply understanding these interventions. It is finding the people and stories behind them.
A spring that has been restored is not merely an environmental story. It can also be a story about the women and children who previously spent hours collecting water. A change in agricultural practices is not merely a story about climate-smart farming. It can be a story about whether a smallholder household can continue producing food, whether traditional crops survive, and who within the household makes decisions about adaptation.
That is the significance of putting gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) at the centre of climate reporting.
Climate change does not affect everyone in the same way. Women, youth, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, and other marginalised groups can face different vulnerabilities and may also possess knowledge and solutions that remain largely absent from mainstream reporting.
Good climate journalism, therefore, cannot be limited to quoting experts and presenting statistics.
It must ask who is affected, who is making decisions, who benefits from adaptation, who may be left behind and whose knowledge is being overlooked.
The workshop aims to strengthen journalists' capacity to produce accurate, ethical and engaging stories on climate adaptation and community resilience. It will also focus on practical skills, including identifying story angles, interviewing communities and developing human-centred narratives.
This is important because climate change is a technically complicated subject. Journalists have to translate scientific information into language that people can understand without losing accuracy. At the same time, they must avoid turning vulnerable communities into passive victims.
There is a growing need for stories that show agency.
Communities are not simply waiting for climate change to happen to them. In many places, they are already adaptingโsometimes with outside support and sometimes through local knowledge and collective action.
The media's role is to document these changes critically.
That means reporting both what works and what does not. It means asking whether adaptation projects are reaching the people most in need, whether local communities have a meaningful say in decisions, and whether interventions can continue after project funding ends.
The workshop's emphasis on collaboration between journalists, climate experts and development practitioners could help address another longstanding challenge in climate reporting: the gap between technical knowledge and public understanding.
For Bhutan, this gap matters.
The country is internationally recognised for its environmental conservation and commitment to climate action, but its mountain communities remain vulnerable to changes in the climate. The consequences are often felt locally, while the causes and solutions are discussed at national, regional and global levels.
Journalists occupy an important space between these levels.
They can bring a village's experience into a national conversation. They can make scientific findings relevant to ordinary people. And they can question policies and projects in ways that help improve climate adaptation.
But this requires more than producing occasional climate stories.
It requires sustained reporting.
The organisers expect participants to leave the two-day workshop with story ideas and reporting plans focused on community-led adaptation under HI-CAS. The broader objective is to build a network of Bhutanese journalists committed to reporting on climate change, environmental sustainability and community resilience.
That may ultimately be the most important outcome.
Climate change is not only a story about temperature, rainfall or extreme weather. It is a story about water, food, livelihoods, health, migration, inequality and the future of communities.
If journalism is to help Bhutan understand and respond to these changes, the stories will have to move beyond the disaster headline.
They will have to go to the communities, listen to the people living with the changes, examine the solutions and ask the difficult questions.
In the end, climate storytelling is not simply about telling people that the climate is changing.
It is about showing how that change is reshaping livesโand what people are doing about it.
