EJN Virtual Media Workshop on Covering Marine Pollution: Agenda

Day 1 – Sources of Marine Pollution (Tuesday, July 18)

8:00-8:10am Introductions, housekeeping and Amrita Gupta
agenda review Senior Editor and Content Officer and
Ocean Media Initiative manager,
Internews’ Earth Journalism Network
(EJN)
8:10-8:50am Marine debris Nancy Wallace
Director of Marine Debris Program,
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), U.S.
8:50-9:30am Light pollution Dr. Thomas Davies
Marine conservation ecologist, lecturer
and academic researcher, School of
Biological and Marine Sciences,
University of Plymouth, U.K.
9:30-10:10am Noise pollution Dr. Lindy Weilgart
Senior ocean noise expert, OceanCare
and research associate, Department of
Biology, Dalhousie University, Canada
10:10-10:30am Questions and wrap-up Amrita Gupta

Day 2 – Governance and Regulatory Measures (Wednesday, July 19)

8:00-8:10am Recap of Day 1 and agenda review Amrita Gupta
8:10-8:30am Experiences on assignment: EJN Emilio Godoy
grantees discuss their marine pollution Anastasia Ika
stories, with a focus on solutions
journalism
8:30-9:30am The IUCN Task Force and INC-2 Plastic Dr. Alexandra Harrington
Pollution Treaty: What’s on the Chair, IUCN Task Force on Plastic
negotiating table? What are the best- Pollution
case outcomes?
9:30-10:20am Policy measures (particularly Dr. Thomas Maes
international, multi-stakeholder efforts) Senior scientist, GRID-Arendal
to reduce land-based sources of marine
pollution: Global Partnership on Marine
Litter (GPML), Global Partnership on
Nutrient Management (GPNM) and the
Global Wastewater Initiative (GW2I)
10:20-10:30am Questions and wrap-up Amrita Gupta

Day 3 – Storytelling (Thursday, July 20)

 8:00-8:30am Recap of Day 2, agenda review and Amrita Gupta
best practices for pitching
8:30-9:30am Editors’ roundtable: What makes a Imelda Abaño
good marine pollution story? Tips and Senior Content Coordinator for
suggestions for journalists Philippines and the Pacific, EJN
Jessica Aldred
Ocean Editor, The Pulitzer Center
Kuek Ser Kuang Keng
Data Editor, The Pulitzer Center and
Innovations Lead, Environmental
Reporting Collective
Adrienne Mason
Managing Editor, Hakai Magazine
Sam Schramski
Special Projects Editor, EJN
9:30-10:15am How to use data to support your Kuek Ser Kuang Keng
marine pollution story
10:15-10:30am Questions, reminders about story Amrita Gupta
grants and certificates

Speakers’ bios

Jessica Aldred is the ocean editor for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a US
non-profit that funds and supports journalists to cover under-reported global
issues. She has more than 20 years’ experience working in major newsrooms in the
UK and Australia; including 10 years as deputy environment editor at The Guardian,
London; and most recently as special projects editor at China Dialogue Trust, where
she edited the China Dialogue Ocean website and led coverage and events on
themes including the ocean, deforestation, climate change and biodiversity loss.

Imelda Abaño is the Senior Content Coordinator for EJN's Asia-Pacific project in the
Philippines and Pacific. She is an award-winning Philippine environmental journalist
and media trainer who has been covering climate change, energy, agriculture,
biodiversity and other environmental issues for over 18 years. Abaño is the
founding President of the Philippine Network of Environmental Journalists, an
organization which was established in 2010 with the assistance of the EJN. As one of
EJN's Council of Partners, she has led and managed various EJN activities and
projects in the Philippines such as environmental reporting, training, mentorship, networking, climate
change and biodiversity grants and developed mobile-based reporting. She is one of the first recipients
of the Climate Change Media Partnership in 2007 and has since covered a series of United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations.
 Dr. Thomas Davies is a marine conservation ecologist at the University of
Plymouth, UK. His research seeks to understand the impacts and management of
man-made global change on ecosystems, and human-environment
interrelationships. He has published research on the impacts and management of a
variety of global change issues, most notably Artificial Light at Night (ALAN). ALAN is
a recently emergent and rapidly growing focus for global change research in the
21st century with ramifications for ecosystems, human health, and human-environment
interrelationships. Dr Davies is Principal Investigator of the Natural Environment Research Council
funded ‘Artificial Light Impacts on Coastal Ecosystems (ALICE)’ project, which combines expertise from
the UK's leading marine science institutions to tackle fundamental gaps in our understanding of coastal
ecosystem responses to ALAN, and how we can manage them. He has published >30 peer reviewed
papers on ecological light pollution and is an internationally recognised authority on ALAN impacts in
marine ecosystems.

Amrita Gupta is EJN’s Senior Editor and Content Officer. She manages EJN’s Ocean
Media Initiative. Amrita is a multimedia journalist and editor with over ten years’
experience reporting on food, agriculture, climate, and the environment. She has a
master’s degree in food studies from New York University and is based in New York.

Dr. Alexandra Harrington is a Lecturer in Law (Environment) at Lancaster University

Law School and Chair of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law
Agreement on Plastic Pollution Task Force. She has held two Fulbright terms in
Canada at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, focusing on global governance
issues, including the 2018 - 2019 Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Global
Governance. She is the Director of Studies for the International Law Association of
Colombia, International Legal Advisor, University of Silesia Just Transitions Committee, and sits on the
editorial boards of multiple academic publications. Dr. Harrington is the author and co-editor of several
books, including International Organizations and the Law, International Law and Global Governance:
Treaty Regimes and Sustainable Development Goals Interpretation, and Just Transitions and the Future
of Law and Regulation. She routinely advises international organizations and governments on legal
issues relating to climate change, governance issues, environmental law, sustainable development and
international human rights law. She holds a Doctorate of Civil Law (McGill University Faculty of Law), in
addition to a JD, LL.M. and BA degrees in Politics and History.

Kuek Ser Kuang Keng is the data editor of environmental investigations at The
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He is a digital journalist, data journalism trainer,
and media consultant based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is the founder of Data-
N, a training program that helps newsrooms integrate data journalism into daily
reporting and innovation lead at the Environmental Reporting Collective. Partnering
with regional journalism organizations including Google News Initiatives, WAN-IFRA
and Internews, he has been conducting regular digital journalism workshops since
2018, reaching over 1,000 journalists in Asia. He also provides consulting and mentoring to media
organizations in data, visual and interactive journalism. He holds a master's in journalism from New York
University. He is a Fulbright scholarship recipient, a Google Journalism Fellow, and a Tow-Knight Fellow.
 Dr. Thomas Maes is a senior scientist at GRID-Arendal, a collaborating centre of
UNEP with highly qualified staff specialising in complex environmental issues. To
tackle the challenge of pollution and waste, Thomas supports global policy
development through the UN frameworks, including UNEA and the Basel,
Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions. Thomas also assists developing countries
with capacity building and research on waste and marine litter's impact, sources,
and pathways. He works closely with the Regional Seas Conventions and other UN
agencies to find regional and global solutions to tackle pollution issues. Thomas operates between
science and policy and develops products to inform policymakers. He specializes in marine litter,
microplastics, POPs, nutrients, hazardous substances, ecotoxicology, circular economy, waste
management, waste trade, and wastewater, and has a growing list of peer-reviewed publications, books
and reports.

Adrienne Mason is the Managing Editor at Hakai Magazine, a publication devoted

to marine and coastal science. She is a biologist and the author of more than thirty
books for children, many about our planet and its animals. She lives in Tofino,
British Columbia, near the Pacific Ocean.

Sam Schramski is EJN’s Special Projects Editor. He focuses on collaborative

reporting projects, as well as online learning and data journalism efforts. Prior to
EJN, he was an adjunct professor and as well as a freelance journalist and editor. He
continues to work as a freelancer apart from his work at EJN. His environmental
journalism has been featured on NPR, Undark, Mongabay and Deutsche Welle,
among others, and he is a former Pulitzer Rainforest Journalism recipient. Sam has
worked extensively in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the USA. In
addition to his years in journalism and academia, he was also an executive director of a nonprofit food
security and sustainability organization. He has a Ph.D. in environmental science and a B.A. in media
studies. Sam is currently based in New Mexico.

Nancy Wallace is the Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration’s Marine Debris Program. The Marine Debris Program is the federal
lead for researching, preventing, and reducing impacts of marine debris in the
United States. Nancy is the Chair of the Interagency Marine Debris Coordinating
Committee and the former Chair of the United Nations Global Partnership on
Marine Litter. Nancy has worked on ocean policy related issues for more than 20
years. Her work includes resource conservation with the National Park Service, developing sustainable
catch limits for fisheries and efforts to improve water quality in the Gulf of Mexico.

Dr. Lindy Weilgart has been specializing in underwater noise pollution and its effects on cetaceans since
1994. She is the Senior Ocean Noise Expert and Policy Consultant for OceanCare
and is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Biology, Dalhousie
University, Canada. Lindy spent one year sailing 50,000km across the Pacific and
back in a 13m sailboat following groups of sperm whales for her post-doctoral
research on dialects. She has served as an expert on several panels, workshops, and
committees concerned with underwater noise impacts (e.g., Department of
Fisheries and Oceans Canada, U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, International Whaling Commission,
etc.). She has met with members of NATO, the European Parliament, the European Commission DG
Fisheries, and the United Nations to discuss ocean noise issues, given many lectures on this topic and
others, and published numerous peer-reviewed papers. She serves as Scientific Advisor for the
International Ocean Noise Coalition and is a member of TG Noise, the technical group on underwater
noise under the EU's Marine Strategy Framework Directive.