“Like it or not, climate change will be the front-page story for the rest of our lives,” writes David Callaway, founder of Callaway Climate Insights, a newsletter on investing in climate solutions. He adds that making a successful global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy will require journalists objectively reporting the facts.

World News Day on Sept. 28 is dedicated to highlighting fact- and science-based investigative reporting that informs our understanding of this most important story of our times.

We’ve seen a grim preview of climate change effects in the past year, most recently including the flash flooding, tornadoes, and deaths in the mid-Atlantic from Hurricane Ida. This followed devastating fires and drought in the West, massive flooding in the South and the sweeping power outage in Texas. Subtler effects are increasing crop losses due to droughts, storms and invasive pests; damaged infrastructure and more frequent heat and weather warnings.

If we’ve been even minimally awake to our surroundings, we’ve also seen the effects in our own lives—for example, with difficulty breathing from poor air quality or flooding in our homes and on our properties like never before. If such effects aren’t something we encounter on a regular basis, they soon will be—much like Covid, whether we “believe” in the effects of climate change or not, they’ll find us.

The story is the same or worse globally—and it’s critical to understand what we need to do to prepare, cope and mitigate worse to come. We need facts, not fantasies tailor made to suit prejudices and political theories of the moment.

World News Day: The Climate Crisis, a virtual event at 9 a.m. EDT on Sept. 28, will showcase journalism from around the world highlighting regional climate change issues, activism and solutions. It will be hosted by Victor Garber, known for film roles in Titanic and Argo, and Farah Nasser, anchor on Global News.

Featured news coverage will include the flooding and wildfires this past year, the impact on wildlife, how lockdowns affected carbon emissions and youth activism. News organizations whose work will be featured include Al Jazeera English, BBC, CBC News, Deutsche Welle, Global News, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Reuters, Sacramento Bee, The Straits Times, South China Morning Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation and Univision.

Registration for the 90-minute event is free, open to a global audience and available in all time zones on Sept. 28.

In addition, you can find the kind of serious climate reporting that World News Day is meant to highlight by following these publications recommended by The Society of Environmental Journalists, including the Associated Press; Climate, Bloomberg Green, CNN: Climate, The Guardian: Climate News, The New York Times: Climate News, Climate Desk, and InsideClimate News. Also, look for ongoing climate reporting at worldnewsday.org/stories/

We can choose instead to share gotcha memes or click to a cable network that makes us feel validated. But, as World News Day illustrates, serious journalists are doing the hard, and sometimes risky, work of explaining the changed world we face. Whether we pay attention to the facts is up to us.