Dialogue Earth at 20: ‘We will not vacate the space’

Birthdays are often a funny thing, particularly those with a zero at the end – 10th, 20th, 50th, 100th. They infuse an ordinary moment with this surreal deliberative quality. You celebrate the present and your existence; look back over the years and wonder what, exactly, they amounted to; and then you find yourself thinking about what comes next, and what must be done to shape it.

Twenty years ago, environmental journalism still had the liberty of behaving as though the environment was a subject of its own. There were climate stories, energy stories, water stories, and biodiversity stories. And then there were stories about politics, economies, migration, health, conflict.

Newsrooms sorted them into different desks. Policymakers did the same. The world was never that neat. But it was possible to report as if it were. A hierarchy did exist. One thing was more important than the other. If a story had to drop off the front page, it would be the environment story.

When China Dialogue was founded in 2006, one of its animating ideas was that China needed to be part of the global conversation on the environment. It was changing at extraordinary speed, and what happened there would have consequences far beyond its borders. One story that year put it very simply: “Climate change will affect China, and China will affect climate change.”

China Dialogue’s homepage in June 2006

This remains true and, in some ways, is even more relevant now. China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and the largest energy consumer; even as it undergoes an ambitious energy transition. It has publicly declared goals of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. The China story is as important now as it ever was.

But 20 years of reporting have also taught us something else. The boundaries around the environmental story have become increasingly difficult to draw. Or justify.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Environment Programme published a report that said exceeding 1.5C warming was now “widely assessed as unavoidable.” For years, it was the line the world had to avoid crossing. Now we are talking the language of “overshoot.” Every fraction of a degree matters. How far we overshoot, and for how long, will determine the risks faced by people, economies and ecosystems.

This is important, because it tells us something about the moment we are living in.

Environmental change is no longer this amorphous, perhaps-in-your-future danger.

It exists. It explains the world around us. Right now.

That world is wide. The transition away from fossil fuels is a story about emissions. It is a story about lithium, copper and nickel; Chinese manufacturing; European industrial policy; South Asian demand and Southeast Asian supply chains.

And that world is deep. The critical minerals that occupy debates in academic papers are extracted from land where people live, AI data centres draw water from scarce sources communities rely on. Jobs are created, livelihoods disrupted, ways of life are changed forever. The environment story runs from the macroeconomy to the household. From the atmosphere to the body.

A catastrophic Himalayan flood in Nepal and Tibet is as much about rainfall, glaciers, rivers and hydropower as it is about public money, warning systems, migration and rebuilding. Heat is about temperature, but is also about safe labour, pre-natal care and urban resilience.

Too often, journalism has separated these stories. Perhaps because our institutions have been organised that way.

Dialogue Earth contains something of that history.

China Dialogue grew into a family of publications: The Third Pole, Diálogo Chino and China Dialogue Ocean. In 2024, those four came together as Dialogue Earth, publishing across one site in eight languages. At the time, we described it as bringing our different platforms into one home.

It was that. But the stories had also started refusing to stay in their homes. China’s choices on energy and infrastructure were turning up in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. A river in the Himalayas could simultaneously be a climate story, an energy story, and a geopolitics story. What happened in the ocean was inseparable from food, trade, supply chains and sovereignty.

Too often, the Global South has been treated as the place where the consequences of environmental change happen, rather than a place from which the world understands that change. But these are countries where cities are growing, technologies are being adopted, and some of the hardest choices about development and climate are being confronted. The knowledge that comes from these places cannot simply be corralled into “evidence”, detached from the people and places that produced it. It has to shape the conversation itself.

These are shifts we are embracing as Dialogue Earth turns 20.

There is another.

At precisely the moment when understanding these connections is more urgent, the contest over information has become sharper. The Reuters Institute’s latest study of climate news found that interest in climate news remains broadly high, but the number of people who saw, read, or heard climate information is falling, from 55% in 2023 to 47% in 2025. In other words, what we may be seeing is not an audience that is turning away, but climate journalism becoming less present in places where people find their information.

Information is not entering an empty, uncontested space. Political interests, commercial interests, algorithms and organised disinformation all operate here. If reliable reporting retreats, something else will occupy that vacuum. Sometimes it will be ignorance. Sometimes it will be a narrative that pushes climate denialism; cold, calculated, and moneyed.

Dialogue Earth will not vacate the space.

We will continue reporting from the places where these changes are being lived. We will follow a story upwards into governments, markets and global systems, and downwards into communities and individual lives. We will move knowledge across borders and languages. We will bring local expertise into global conversations and global decisions back to the people who experience their consequences.

And we will resist the temptation to make the world simpler than it is. Dialogue does not mean pretending everybody agrees. Increasingly, it means insisting that what someone knows in one part of the world can still reach somebody in another, particularly in a moment when politics is making that exchange harder.

So, we will mark our 20th year by looking forward.

Beginning tomorrow, Dialogue Earth will over five months publish 20 essays from thinkers and practitioners across continents, disciplines and very different lived realities. These extraordinary people span climate science, policy, geopolitics, activism, environmental justice, literature and the arts. The Earth Ahead series will not offer one answer. That is rather the point. Environmental change is now shaping our lives at too many levels, and interacting with too many other forces, for one discipline, one geography, or one way of seeing to be enough.

Taken together, I hope these essays do something that has always been central to Dialogue Earth: allow different kinds of knowledge to encounter each other.

Twenty years ago, environmental journalism often had to argue for the importance of the environment. The task now is different. It is to see environmental change as a central condition of our time: shaping economies and politics, but also people, inequality and discrimination. The essays are one way of trying to understand the world.

Our reporting is another: following changes through systems and into lives. Across borders. Across languages. From the science to the home. From global decisions to their local consequences.

The information landscape will only get more contested. Follow us into the next 20 years, and beyond.

Because Dialogue Earth will not vacate the space.