Keeping ‘nature’ on the public agenda in a noisy world
By Rina Tsubaki and Jonas Simons.
As news attention shifts towards political turmoil and wars around the world, environmental topics are often pushed aside on today’s public agenda. Every minute human eyes turn away from these issues, insects, birds, plants and microorganisms living on the planet are severely affected. Forests, dunes, bogs and other habitats contribute to biodiversity protection in complex ways, and without people telling these stories, our society may never truly understand how our decisions on the use of landscapes influence the marginalised lives that share this planet with us.
With the EU Nature Restoration Regulation underway and member states in the midst of drafting their National Restoration Plans (NRPs), this is a prime moment for journalists to closely follow what national authorities plan to do to restore habitats in the years ahead. Yet journalism as a profession often demands great agility. Even for science journalists, let alone those covering daily news, one day may be spent on climate adaptation and the next on artificial intelligence. This constant topic-switching makes the life of journalists particularly demanding.
Investigative journalists, however, work quite differently. They follow themes closely over extended periods, digging deeper into specific issues. But when it comes to accessing insights from the scientific world, there are still many bridges to be built. That is why initiatives like the Climate Arena Conference, a gathering of investigative journalists focusing on environmental topics, organised by the Arena for Journalism in Europe, play such an important role in the journalism space. They strive to keep environmental issues at the forefront of European investigative journalism, while actively working to make collaborations between journalists, academia and civil society happen. Their recent cross-border project Green to Gray, an investigation into nature loss in collaboration with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), is a compelling example of this attempt.
On 10 October 2025, during the 2025 conference edition in Budapest, we had the opportunity to exchange with 38 journalists from across Europe in the panel ‘Investigating Nature Restoration in Europe’. Moderated by Jelena Prtorić, a journalist involved in Green to Gray, we shared the work we have been carrying out under two Horizon Europe-funded projects, INFORMA and SUPERB.
Rather than going into extensive detail about research methodologies and findings, our focus was on a wider lens: helping journalists navigate what and where to look when thinking about investigations into nature restoration in Europe. Covering forest management and restoration basics, Jonas Simons from KU Leuven explored the ecological aspects and shared examples of management debates in European contexts, offering guidance on the variables that matter when we discuss whether humans should intervene in forests or not. Rina Tsubaki from the European Forest Institute, on the other hand, focused on the social aspects, reflecting on the human enablers and barriers that can hinder nature restoration efforts. She shared some insights from her social media analysis of restoration sites in Denmark, where human interests became the main bottleneck for biodiversity protection.
The importance of local context emerged as a key theme: existing public values, uses, interests and concerns can easily be overlooked when ecological restoration plans, developed at the European or national levels, are parachuted into local communities.
During the session, we also shared a few data-driven tools that could be useful for journalists, including Seed4Forest, which supports decision-making on which tree species may perform best under climate pressure and the tipsheet, Climate Reporting: 5 Tips for Sourcing Stories Online on how to source stories online, co-developed with researchers from King’s College London and Politecnico di Milano.
“No two forests are the same, and neither are the stories they tell. Journalists play a crucial role in revealing this diversity — celebrating successes, exposing failures, showing the wonders of nature, and confronting the threats it faces – while drawing the right conclusions along the way. To shape a healthier future, collaborations between scientists and journalists are essential.,” said Jonas Simons, reflecting on his experience at Climate Arena.
Clearly, direct engagement between the worlds of science and journalism is much needed. Scientists can’t simply wait for journalists to reach out when their research happens to make the news. Greater effort is required from both sides, individually and collectively, to place nature at the centre of public attention.
