From the Blue Community Environmental Defenders (ED), Uganda:
In a health emergency, accurate information saves as many lives as medicine does. Moreover, radio and mass media can be powerful tools to empower the community to fight zoonotic diseases through reporting regularly on health and sharing vital health information during an emergency. It provides reliable, accurate, useful information on the virus and its wider impacts, as well as offers editorial programs to help share high-quality programming throughout the crisis.
It’s against this background that from June 15 to 17, 2026, Environmental Defenders (ED) brought together 26 journalists from more than 10 media houses across Mahagi Territory for a residential training on environmental reporting, biodiversity, and pandemics. We chose a residential format on purpose to limit movement and reduce exposure as Ebola sweeps through Ituri Province.
The workshop, organized with the Mahagi section of the National Union of the Congolese Press, equipped reporters to connect three things that are never separate in eastern DRC: the protection of Ituri’s forests, the rights of local communities, and global health security.
Over three days, participants worked through the fundamentals of environmental journalism, the climate realities already reshaping Mahagi, the “One Health” approach to covering outbreaks, and the tools of fact-checking and conflict-sensitive reporting. They diagnosed the ecological pressures on their own doorsteps, from destroyed fish spawning grounds to gold mining polluting the waterways, and they visited the University of Lake Albert meteorological station to see how field data can anticipate both health and environmental risk.
One lesson anchored the week, from epidemiologist Dr. Aubain Luambo of the Mahagi Referral Health Center: “If we kill the environment, the environment kills us too.”
The Congo Basin holds the second-largest tropical rainforest on the planet, and the journalists who cover this territory are among the few who can warn the public before more is lost. By the close of the workshop, they had committed to forming a standing network of pro-environment journalists in Mahagi, and most importantly, they are well prepared to apply the knowledge acquired to protect their forests and save lives in ituri.
Read the full story here
![First Report from the World Social Forum, [vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From Souleymane Guindo Coordinator for the Blue Community French-Africa attending t](https://blue-community.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2b59b262-a1ce-4c3d-97c5-30df80eda0c9-414x224.jpg "Report from the World Social Forum - Day 2 5")
