My name is Fazila Faruk. I'm the Executive Director of SACSIS, the South African Civil Society Information Service. On behalf of SACSIS, I'd like to welcome you all to our second annual media roundtable discussion. This year we're examining how the media reports on climate change. Last year we examined how the media reports on the economy. SACSIS has an interest in how the media reports on critical development and socio-economic issues because we believe in building a strong democracy based on an informed citizenry. For this interest, public interest journalism is very important to us. We care particularly about where the media, as the fourth estate, resonates the aspirations of the majority in our country. And in South Africa, as we know, the majority are predominantly poor people. Or are the media in South Africa captured by special interest groups? Our interest in public interest journalism stems from the fact that we're a social justice organization and we're interested in advancing the rights of the poorest in society. And particularly with respect to this whole issue of climate change, it is actually the poor who are most seriously affected by climate change. Poor people commonly live on marginal land that is prone to drought and flood. Poor people also commonly in industrialized sectors of our society live in areas where heavy industries pollute the atmosphere and that also has devastating impacts on their health as well. But climate change is obviously not something that only affects poor people, even though we as SACSIS approach the issue from that perspective. Climate change is something that affects everybody in society. We're all witnessing and experiencing changes in weather. We're affecting the way we love. And it's for this reason that environmentalists have been lobbying governments for many, many years to do something about the problem of global warming. The problem unfortunately is that over many years of negotiations we haven't arrived at any negotiated deal on how to reduce global warming. So that Africa will be hosting an important meeting in a couple of weeks time towards the end of November, early December. It's the latest round in international and global climate negotiations, commonly known as COP17. Many of you may have read about it in newspapers. Many of you here are environmental activists who've been working on the issue and tracking it very closely. Through the work that you do. And we're particularly interested in the run up to COP17 because we're an organization that engages with the media. We're particularly interested in how the media reports in climate change. From our point of view we're interested in ascertaining what is the media's messaging in the run up to COP17. What are they reporting on with respect to climate change? Do we, as people working in civil society and in the environmental sector, or just people here with an interest in climate change? Do we believe that they're focusing on the right issues? Do we think there are blind spots in the media's reporting? They'll talk to us today about the areas that they focus on. And I hope that we're going to have a robust engagement and debate with them about these issues. Thank you.