Applications Invited for Earth Journalism Network Asia Pacific Media Grants 2025

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About the Organization

Created in 2004, EJN is now a truly global network of reporters and media outlets in virtually every region of the world.

Environmental and climate change reporting is now more urgent than ever, but journalists face myriad and mounting challenges in covering these topics. The media industry is in crisis, and misinformation is on the rise. Reporters working for cash-strapped news agencies often don't have the resources to research a story properly; freelancers, even less so. That’s where EJN comes in.

About the Grant

In 2024, countries across the Asia Pacific experienced scorching heatwaves and droughts and grappled with monsoon rains that triggered catastrophic floods and landslides.

According to the Asian Development Bank, climate impacts alone could lead to a 17% GDP drop across Asia and the Pacific by 2070 under a high carbon emissions scenario, which could rise to 41% of GDP by the end of the century.

And as the climate crisis accelerates, it exacerbates challenges across the region: claiming lives, threatening livelihoods and children’s educations, increasing the burden of poverty, food insecurity and disease, and further destabilizing ecosystems and biodiversity.

These interconnected global crises pose a grave threat to vulnerable nations, and existing funding commitments do little to meet the need for adaptation, mitigation and resilience.

To boost public awareness of these issues – and the urgent need for cross-sectoral solutions – the Earth Journalism Network is pleased to announce a new round of media grants through its Asia-Pacific Phase 2 project, which aims to boost the quantity and quality of environmental coverage in the region and amplify the perspectives of at-risk communities.

This project has received generous financial support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

Objectives

Proposed activities should seek to:

• Strengthen the capacity of journalists and media organizations to produce high-quality, evidence-based and engaging environmental stories on the consequences of human impacts on the environment and viable solutions to mitigate and respond to these impacts.
• Improve the quality and quantity of content and/or media coverage on key environmental themes to focus public attention on the interdependence of the health and well-being of humans and their environments.
• Direct public attention to the disproportionate impacts of environmental degradation on women, the poor, youth, Indigenous Peoples, ethnic minorities and other vulnerable groups and increase these groups’ access to high-quality, publicly available environmental information.
• Contribute to positive changes in environmental governance, policy actions, environmental standards in the private sector or consumer habits for a more sustainable way of life.

Themes

For this round, we are particularly interested in proposals that focus on one or more of the following themes:

• Under-reported environmental issues and their linkages with  health, organized crime, migration, conflict and other issues
• The interdependence of the health and well-being of humans, animals and their environments
• Environmental governance and natural resource management
• The energy transition and climate financing
• Viable environmental solutions for community resilience in the face of interconnected environmental crises

We welcome proposals that seek to:

• Incorporate the ethical use of AI as a tool to support journalists in their reporting on environmental issues.
• Work with social media content creators or include social media outreach to access a diverse and widespread audience online
• Work with marginalized groups, such as women, youth, Indigenous People, ethnic minority groups. people with disabilities, or poor households
• Examples of activities or outputs that can be supported include, but are not limited to:
• Training workshops for journalists and/or content creators, to increase the quality and quantity of climate and environmental information in news outlets and/or social media
• Story grants and mentoring for journalists and/or content creators
• The development of reporters’ resources and/or e-learning tools to benefit environmental reporters and their audiences
• The development of innovative mapping, data visualization and/or fact-checking tools to support reporting and/or the distribution of environmental stories
• Transboundary, collaborative, investigative and/or data-led reporting projects that facilitate peer-to-peer learning and content sharing among media outlets based in different regions or countries
• The establishment of new storytelling platforms
• Partnerships and network-building activities such as the formation of an environmental journalists’ network or an investigative reporting collective
• Cross-sectoral collaborations and knowledge exchange between journalists, information providers, researchers and policymakers

Grant Size

This grant fund has US$100,000 available for awards this year, which would ideally be shared among 5-6 projects. The grant amount can range between US$15,000 to US$20,000 depending on the scope of the proposed activities.

Eligibility

• This round of grants will be focused on supporting media outlets, journalism institutions and other organizations that work directly with media or content creators in the Asia-Pacific region. Applicant organizations must be legally permitted to receive grants from foreign organizations.
• Civil society organizations, community-based groups and research institutions will not be eligible for this round.
• For the purpose of this call, we are only accepting applications from low-and middle-income countries in the Asia-Pacific region. We are unfortunately unable to accept applications from Pakistan and Central Asian or Middle Eastern countries. 
• EJN reserves the right to disqualify applicants from consideration if they have been found to have engaged in unethical or improper professional conduct, including, but not limited to, plagiarism and submitting AI-generated content as their own.

How to Apply

Deadline: 30 January, 2025, 11:59 PM (Pacific/Niue)

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Tags Environment and Sustainability Research Journalism/ Reporting Others