EJN’s Biodiversity Media Initiative Announces 4 Media Grantees and 4 Story Grantees
Flora and fauna and human beings alike depend on biodiversity to provide food, water, clean air, medicine and materials as well as benefits to wellbeing. At its current pace of destruction—driven by habitat destruction, pollution, over-exploitation, and climate change, the survival of our planet hangs in the balance, and immediate, concrete, and effective action is needed more urgently than ever.
To help inform the public and create demand for the change that’s so urgently needed, Internews’ Earth Journalism Network’s Biodiversity Media Initiative project, which was launched in 2016 and is now in its third phase, has awarded media grants to four organizations seeking to strengthen and diversify media coverage in countries where biodiversity loss is occurring at an alarming rate.
This round, we received 154 eligible applications, making for a competitive selection process. The organizations that have been awarded grants in this round are:
1) Abraji (Brazil)
2) Asian Dispatch (India)
3) MKAAJI MPYA asbl (Democratic Republic of Congo)
4) Macaranga
Asian Dispatch, Macaranga and Abraji (Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo) will all focus their work on combatting wildlife crimes—while Asian Dispatch will deliver training to newsrooms on key biodiversity topics and produce a cross-border investigation on transnational wildlife trafficking in the Himalayas, focusing in particular on the Tibetan antelope, Abraji will be expanding their digital mapping tool which registers environmental crimes, such as illegal deforestation and poaching. Macaranga will train journalists on how to cover illegal wildlife crime court proceedings with the aim of increasing public awareness, and placing pressure on legal organizations to strengthen laws and policies. Mkaaji Mpya (meaning ‘New Peasant’ in Kiswahili) aims to support journalists and media organizations to monitor the efficiency and progress of their country’s progress toward achieving the 23 targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework, and to investigate any activities that may contravene and undermine them in the lead up to the next biodiversity COP to be held later this year in Cali, Colombia.
As part of this new phase, EJN has also awarded four story grants to journalists aiming to shine a light on underreported threats to biodiversity and on stewards of natural world, predominantly Indigenous communities. This round, we received 204 eligible applications, and we were pleased to award grants to the following journalists:
1) Bayu Asya Isminanda and Finlan Adhitya Aldan, Garda Animalia, (Indonesia)
2) Mawada Bahah and Ahmad Haj Hamdo, Daraj Media and Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ), (Turkey)
3) Nils Benjamin Hindrichs, Die Zeit, (Germany)
4) Stanley Thomas Alcorn, in collaboration with Tomás Uprimny Añez, Marketplace, 99% Invisible and El Espectador, (Colombia/US)
The chosen grantees’ stories will delve into the viability and sustainability of biodiversity credits, the implication of a high-profile conservation project in the eviction of Maasai communities, and threats to endangered wildlife, such as marine turtles and Syrian owls, while highlighting scalable and replicable solutions.
“The judging panels for both media grants and story grants were on the lookout for innovative approaches and well-articulated pathways to lasting impacts,” said Mike Shanahan, program manager for the BMI project. “The many high-quality proposals that EJN received shows that there is no shortage of great ideas for improving coverage of biodiversity loss and conservation.”
Look out for their stories on the EJN website in the coming months.
Banner image: Elephants are keystone species and are known as ‘ecosystem engineers’ because of how much they shape their habitat/Credit: Mylon Ollila via Unsplash.
