Why Every Modern Agriculture Story Is Also a Climate Change Story

Despite spending more than two years reporting on agriculture and documenting the changing realities of farmers and their businesses, I still felt out of place when I joined a training on climate change reporting. It wasn't because the topic seemed too difficult or unfamiliar. I didn't see myself as a climate reporter.

As an agriculture journalist, I write about young agribusiness owners, smallholder farmers, and the realities of running a farm. I report on how seed choices affect yields and income. I cover the challenges farmers face in accessing loans, buying fertiliser and other inputs, and coping with shrinking earnings after harvest.

Climate change often appeared in my stories as one of the many challenges facing modern agriculture. But, to me, it belonged in a separate category; a different conversation with its own language, one I had only understood at a basic level.

By the end of the training, I realised I had been looking at it the wrong way. Climate change is not a separate beat from agriculture. It is deeply woven into it, and it was the missing piece in many of the stories I had been telling.

A Misconception about Climate Change

It took just one question from the facilitator for me to stop feeling like an impostor and start feeling like I belonged in the room. That ability to make complex ideas feel accessible is probably why Seyifunmi Adebote was invited to facilitate the July edition of Social Voices' Monthly Solutions Story Lab, themed Why Climate Stories Fail and How to Report Them Better.

An environmental and communications practitioner, Adebote has spent nearly a decade working across newsrooms, policy spaces, and podcast studios as the host of the Climate Talk podcast. He opened the session with a simple but thought-provoking question: What is a climate story?

The responses revealed how differently many journalists understand the subject.

"Disaster." "Displacement." "Flooding." "Farmer-herder clashes over shrinking water resources." These were some of the first answers. One participant described climate stories as "rage-baiting headlines and then policy jargon you can't process." Another offered a broader definition, saying they are stories that "translate the complexity of environmental issues into something the common man can understand."

Adebote acknowledged every response before introducing the idea that would shape the rest of the session. A climate story, he explained, is simply the story of people and their environment interacting. Once you see it that way, you realise that almost nothing is exempt from being a climate story.

Why climate stories fail & how to report them better

Adebote walked us through what he described as four major shifts needed in climate reporting. The first, he argued, is to stop writing without a clear audience in mind. Too often, climate stories are produced for everyone and end up resonating with no one.

Another problem is the way climate is framed. Coverage often reduces it to floods, heatwaves, desertification, or the latest UN funding announcement, while the people living through those realities are pushed to the background. Nigeria, he said, does not suffer from a shortage of climate data. It suffers from a shortage of storytelling that gives the data meaning and inspires people to act.

One reason for this public inaction, he explained, is invisibility. When stories make climate change feel distant or abstract, people struggle to see why it matters until disaster reaches their own doorstep.

Language is another barrier. Reports overloaded with technical jargon often exclude the very people who need the information most. An excessive focus on outputs instead of outcomes only widens that gap, making climate reporting feel disconnected from everyday life.

He also pointed to another challenge: fragmented ownership. Because climate change affects virtually every sector, no single newsroom desk fully claims responsibility for covering it. As a result, important stories often fall through the cracks.

Then there is the problem of fear-driven reporting. Stories that dwell only on catastrophe may capture attention, but they rarely inspire action. Instead, they trigger what Adebote described as a "flight-or-freeze" response—people feel overwhelmed rather than empowered.

Equally troubling is whose voices are missing. Farmers, fisherfolk, women, and young people are frequently written about in climate stories, yet they are rarely allowed to tell their own experiences.

That point stayed with me, along with a distinction Adebote made between what he called door-closing and door-opening storytelling.

Door-closing stories lead with fear and shame: the world is ending, someone threw rubbish from a moving car, the crisis is unstoppable. They leave readers alarmed but powerless. Door-opening stories start with the same facts but ask a different question: Where is the opportunity for action? They look for small but meaningful ways people can respond, creating a sense of agency rather than helplessness.

To illustrate this, Adebote shared a story he wrote about Nigerians turning to solar power. He believes the piece succeeded because it followed the story through every layer of its human impact. It featured the family struggling with constant blackouts, the technician installing solar panels, the policymaker shaping the sector, and even the person asking what happens to a solar panel at the end of its lifespan. It was one story, he said, seen through five different pairs of eyes.

How climate change affects agriculture

His narration of the correlation between the disappearance of bees and declining environmental health brought the point together for me. 

Adebote had announced that people’s answers about what's shifting in their daily lives are enough to start a story on climate change, and I sat there thinking about planting dates that no longer match the routine. Rainfall arriving weeks late or early and with a higher intensity than the previous year. Soil that tires faster than it used to. Pests turning up in places they had never survived before. Livestock performing lower and finding it more difficult to survive lean seasons. Harvests that shrink, then food prices that don't align with forecasts. 

It is now clear to me that my reports about farmers' livelihoods quietly being rewritten by weather they didn't choose are no longer just agriculture stories but also climate stories.

If climate is reshaping everything a farmer depends on, then I had never once written a "pure" agriculture story. I had been writing climate stories all along and hadn't labelled them, which meant I'd also been missing half of what made them worth telling.

The scale of what's at stake makes that omission harder to defend. FAO-backed analysis found that flooding in October 2024 alone affected over 9.2 million people and submerged 4.5 million hectares of land, including roughly 1.6 million hectares of farmland, with potential cereal losses, enough to feed 13 million people for a year, nearing $1 billion. The same period's Cadre Harmonisé analysis projected 33.1 million Nigerians would face acute food insecurity by mid-2025, driven by inflation, conflict and climate shocks together. What can we say about these numbers a year later?

Nigeria's own Nationally Determined Contribution already names agriculture among its five priority sectors for adaptation, proof the connection isn't a journalist's stretch; it's already policy, just rarely told as a human scene.

Reflections after the session

As a retrained journalist and a brand-new climate reporter, I am learning to tell more complete stories. I no longer see agriculture and climate change as neighbouring beats that occasionally overlap. They are inseparable, and my reporting should reflect that.

Inspired by my sensei's lessons, I am becoming more intentional about how I frame my stories and present the people at their centre. My goal is not just to inform readers but to help them see how deeply climate change is woven into their own lives.

I am also resisting the temptation to overwhelm readers with statistics and technical language. Instead of simply reporting that 1.6 million hectares of farmland were flooded, I want to explain what that figure means for the families who lost their harvests, the communities facing higher food prices, and the consumers who will eventually feel the impact.

The next time I sit down with a farmer, I already know I will ask different questions. I will look for richer context, stronger connections, and the human stories behind the data. Most importantly, I know I will never write an agriculture story the way I used to again.