How POLITICO writes about the EU and Sustainable Development Goals
POLITICO is a media company that covers, as they call it themselves, ‘the politics, policy and personalities of the European Union,’ mostly through short news items but also through full stories. How do they address Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their day-to-day work and bring this to their main readers? Two POLITICO reporters — Eline Schaart, who mainly covers sustainability and chemicals policy in the EU, and Paola Tamma, who focuses on environmental issues, explain why and how they use different instruments to bring news about sustainability issues to EU citizens and the rest of the world.
By Eline Schaart and Paola Tamma, POLITICO
SDGs coverage intersecting with many policy areas…
The term Sustainable Development Goals doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s an issue that frequently crops up in POLITICO’s coverage of the European Union.
The Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, are a set of 17 targets that the world’s nations signed up to in 2015 under the United Nations’ umbrella, giving themselves a 2030 deadline to achieve them all. They include broad commitments such as ending poverty and hunger, but also more specific policy objectives such as ensuring that everyone has access to clean water and to affordable and sustainable energy. Each goal comes with measurable targets.
The goals as adopted by the U.N. are meant to set the direction of travel for governments. The job of the European Commission is to transform those broad policy goals into legislative targets. EU policy should reflect SDGs and trickle down into specific policy objectives. Many pieces of EU legislation are linked to the SGDs, with examples ranging from the Renewable Energy Directive, to the Drinking Water Directive, as well as all climate legislation.
That makes the SDGs relevant for coverage of the EU, as the bloc regularly reports on its progress toward the goals, upholding its legislative efforts and drawing links between its own targets and the U.N. agenda.
POLITICO’s coverage of SDGs is largely related to where the goals intersect with specific policy areas related to how we divide up EU policy — for instance in agriculture, health, sustainability, financial services and climate and energy. Most stories are focused on the EU’s actions (or lack thereof) in achieving the SGDs. The words ‘sustainable development goals’ appeared in over 400 articles across a variety of POLITICO policy areas.
…or we cover them in a wider context
POLITICO’s stories can be divided into three broad categories. The first is newsletters dedicated to a specific policy area. That is where the vast majority of our SDG coverage occurs, usually in the form of ‘blurbs’ — one or two paragraph stories focusing on a single policy development.
The SGDs are either written about in a global context — a recent example is the World Health Organization’s determination that countries are behind schedule in meeting their SDGs — or in an EU-related framework — such as the dispute between the European Commission and the European Court of Auditors over what constitutes good sustainability reporting.
In the latter case, POLITICO received an embargoed copy of the ECA’s review and went to a press briefing in Brussels with Eva Lindström, the ECA member responsible for the publication. We wrote about the launch of the review in our daily sustainability snapshot newsletter, which goes out every afternoon and includes insights and news related to sustainability from, among other things, the European institutions, EU countries, industry organizations, academia and environmental groups. In the reporting, we summarized the ECA report and provided a short overview of the EU directive from 2014 that obliged certain large companies to provide sustainability information of their business by 2018.
The launch of the report was followed a week later by a forum on sustainability reporting organized by the ECA. We went to the morning session of the forum to follow the exchange between the Commission and ECA to consequently report in our newsletter that the two parties differ on what constitutes good sustainability reporting.
POLITICO’s remaining story formats are alerts — short news items about 250 words in length, and full stories, which can be significantly longer and entail much higher levels of reporting. Alerts are focused on breaking news, and SDGs are often a topic. A recent one involving the goals looked at the European Commission’s public consultation on Horizon Europe and to what extent SDGs such as clean water or good health should feature in the multibillion-euro research and innovation program.
The SDGs are a rarity in full stories, and when they do occur, they tend not to be the main focus of the article. That’s the case in an interview published in May 2019 with Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He mentions SDGs once in a broad-ranging interview covering a range of other topics.
Increasing coverage?
Presumably, the importance of SDGs for decision-makers is reflected in our coverage of them. So the more you will read about it in our alerts and full stories, the more likely readers of the ECA Journal will come across them one way or the other in their activities .
This article was first published on the 3/2019 issue of the ECA Journal. The contents of the interviews and the articles are the sole responsibility of the interviewees and authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Court of Auditors.
