Green Echoes #60: Dirty Data Study Sessions, Opportunities, and More
Our stories, a round-up of opportunities, and more.
Welcome to Green Echoes, a newsletter from the Environmental Reporting Collective that highlights key investigative stories, data sources, funding, reporting and training opportunities and our projects from across Asia.
I’m Nithin Coca, a Japan-based freelance journalist, and the curator of this newsletter.
Last week, we held our first Dirty Data Study Group Session. When our reporters from India documented what Google’s data center expansion is doing to communities there, they didn’t expect the story itself to get restricted – with our posts being inaccessible to Indian netizens on Instagram.
The session featured the journalists behind the investigation, Monica Jha and Shamsheer Yousaf, along with Naman Kumar and Jhanvi Anam from the Internet Freedom Foundation.
If you missed it, the entire recording is here.
Our next Study Session: In the Dark: Data Center Spillover in Asia
This session will focus on our investigations in Asia, arguable the center of the global Data Center surge, and where there are widespread concerns about adverse environmental, social and human rights impacts.
Join to learn from journalists on the ground in Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia about their reporting and the worrying pattern in all three places; communities bearing costs they weren’t consulted about.
📆 Time: July 17th 15:00 (GMT+8)
✍🏽 Register here
Grantee Investigations
In addition to our global collaboration, ERC also supports investigative reporting by outlets through grants. Here are two recent stories published by our partners.
Mekong Eye looked into how a forest sanctuary was turned into a scam zone, with huge amounts of protected forest loss and illegal displacement being turned into casinos, office blocks, and more.
And from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, explores the surge in river dredging along the country’s western seaboard, which is harming rivers and coastlines, finding that they’re being run by Philippine companies, some of them formed by Chinese nationals who have recently acquired Philippine citizenship.
Opportunities and Resources
For those of you in Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan or Madagascar: Earth Journalism Network is accepting applications in multiple languages for Biodiversity and Nature-based Solutions Story Grants focused on supporting the production of in-depth media stories on biodiversity and nature-based solutions (deadline 30 June).
Also from EJN: Biodiversity Fellowships for Journalists to Cover the UN Biodiversity Conference in Armenia. Note: only for applications from a low- or middle-income country.
JournalismFund.EU is accepting applications for its next round of Environmental Investigative Journalism grants, to support cross-border teams of professional journalists (deadline 6 August).
The Fund for Investigative Journalism also is accepting applications for its regular and seed grants program to support high-quality, unbiased, nonpartisan investigative stories that have an impact (deadline 14 Sept).
Join the ERC Slack community to meet and engage with fellow journalists and for more grants and other opportunities.
The Environmental Reporting Collective is a growing network of journalists and newsrooms from over a dozen countries, all dedicated to investigating environmental crimes collaboratively.
To learn more about our work, check out our website, Investigative.Earth, and follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook and X.