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Why the story of climate change needs you on World News Day

  • This year’s World News Day focuses on journalism’s role in providing trustworthy information about an urgent issue that defines our lifetime – climate change
  • Ever since Hong Kong’s observatory started tracking meteorological data in 1884, the city’s weather pattern has experienced significant shifts

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
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Low water level at Hong Kong’s Tai Tam Upper Reservoir amid an unprecedented heat wave on 29 May 2018, exposing the yellow earth of the reservoir bed. Photo: Winson Wong.

Dear Reader,

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Today marks the fourth annual World News Day, a global campaign to support journalists and highlight the value of fact-based journalism in making the world a better place.
This year, World News Day focuses on journalism’s critical role in providing trustworthy information about an urgent issue that will define our lifetime – climate change.
Because Hong Kong is so prone to typhoons, covering climate change has become a natural imperative for the South China Morning Post. A history of covering typhoons has given SCMP a proclivity for reporting on weather disasters ever since this newspaper first put a front-page story on a typhoon’s devastation of the city in 1906.
A powerful typhoon made landfall in Hong Kong on 7 September 1906 (before the naming convention on tropical cyclones was adopted), claiming 11,000 lives and running 41 merchant ships ashore. The Central waterfront building that housed South China Morning Post, then three years old, is visible in the photograph’s left corner. Photo: Hong Kong Museum of History.
A powerful typhoon made landfall in Hong Kong on 7 September 1906 (before the naming convention on tropical cyclones was adopted), claiming 11,000 lives and running 41 merchant ships ashore. The Central waterfront building that housed South China Morning Post, then three years old, is visible in the photograph’s left corner. Photo: Hong Kong Museum of History.
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Since then, the drastic changes in our climate has made it impossible for us to ignore the crisis that is escalating by the day. Ever since the Hong Kong Observatory started tracking meteorological data in 1884, the city’s weather pattern has experienced significant shifts.
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