Breaking new ground: A 2024 OCRI review
What a year 2024 has been! It still feels like yesterday when we shared about the global difference our Open Climate Reporting Initiative (OCRI) made in 2023, and just like a flash, we are here again at the end of 2024. Read on for a glimpse to how OCRI is breaking new grounds.
Ending OCRI Year 2 on a high!
We closed out the second implementing year of the Open Climate Reporting Initiative (OCRI) in March following our collaboration with 10 organisations in 3 regions namely Brazil & Lusophone Africa, South Asia and the Middle East & North Africa (MENA). Key highlights of OCRI Y2 was our ability to nearly double the number trained in Y1 going up from 225 to 444 and the 66 story projects published through OCRI’s support! We took some time to reflect on our 2-year journey by visualising OCRI’s footprints around the world and detailing what reporting climate change really means. Read here.
Developing the Climate Investigations Course (CIC)
Having secured an 18-month extension with Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF) that will take OCRI until September 2025 at least, we did extensive work with 12 CIJ trainers – from India, Italy, Nepal, Nigeria, Sudan, the United Kingdom and the United States – in developing the Climate Investigations Course (CIC) this year that we hope to continue running into the future as a legacy of OCRI. The CIC is a new 4-module course put together in English that will become part of our scheduled course offerings online from Q1 2025. Over the course of many weeks, we met and discussed with the CIJ trainers who developed training content on Introduction to Climate Investigations, Investigating Climate Finance, Data-driven Climate Investigations (DDCI) and ECOSINT – Digital Tools & Methodologies for Climate Investigations.
OCRI at #CIJSummer2024: And the beat goes on!
For the 3rd consecutive year running, OCRI made visible appearance at the 2024 CIJ Summer Conference held 3-4 July. The climate/environmental theme at the conference was made up of 3 classes and a talk that featured climate investigations. Also, just like last year, we teamed up again with Journalism Fund EU to host some OCRI year two partners alongside other climate and environmental journalists at a pre-summer conference climate networking event called OCRI Focus day. This is in line with one of OCRI’s objectives of building a trusted network of contacts across the globe to do investigations with bigger international impact. The OCRI focus day held July 2 and also in partnership with Bertha Foundation was a huge success. The invitation-only convening focused on the key issues journalists face when investigating climate-related issues: from fighting misinformation to using new investigative tools. You can catch up here about the focus day and OCRI at the 2024 #CIJSummer Investigative Journalism Conference.
Delivering 4 OCRI story-lab workshops
Following the development of the course content, we delivered a core, region-contextualized and translated version (where applicable) of the CIC by working with 4 OCRI partners and 19 regional trainers in Anglophone Africa, Francophone Africa, Latin America and South Asia. The CIC was delivered in French and Spanish for Francophone Africa and Latin America respectively.
With more than 1000 applicants showing interest to participate in the regional story-lab workshops, we are glad to have trained 49 journalists from 24 countries across the 4 regions in 2024. Outside the 53 countries reached at the end of OCRI Y2 in March, we reached 5 new countries in Y3 by December namely Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Guinea, Togo, El Salvador and Sri Lanka.
The full CIC consists of 14 sessions within the 4 modules. We identified 10 core sessions that were delivered during the in-person story-lab workshops in Nigeria, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire and Sri Lanka by taking into consideration constraints like time and other region-specific needs. The story-lab workshops did not only deliver hands-on training but also provided participants with the opportunity to work on live research projects together in the same space with access to resources and expertise, building frameworks for their investigations, analysing data, and mapping out impact plans for the anticipated publications. We are currently providing extensive post-workshop follow-up support to the participants/cohort with our partners. At least 25 OCRI supported stories are in the works and the projects were carefully selected to achieve an investigative, collaborative and cross-border approach in reporting climate change.
Some wins and looking ahead
We look forward to the impactful stories that will be published and the full launch of the CIC in 2025! We hope that the CIC will become highly sought after as we finetune and prepare for launching as a CIJ scheduled course. We believe we are heading in the right direction as trained OCRI journalists are still reaping benefits from past training. Two examples are from our Climate Change in New Media project with UNESCO that ended in July 2023. Two of the stories published during the project won awards at the 2024 Covering Climate awards and the Annual Sanlam Financial Journalism Awards. It is a testament of OCRI’s strides and we look forward to a 2025 full of P-O-S-S-I-B-I-L-I-T-I-E-S!