Catching up with OCRI at 2024 #CIJSummer

For the third year in a row, the CIJ’s Open Climate Reporting Initiative (OCRI) featured prominently at the annual #CIJSummer Conference. Notwithstanding the UK general elections that was called in May, the conference was fully booked and a huge success welcoming 190 delegates and 42 speakers!

OCRI hosted an invitation-only event tagged OCRI Focus Day a day to the conference that brought together over twenty climate and environment journalists from all over the world. The event discussed cases, tools and collaborations while also emphasizing the need for journalists to sharpen their skills in data, digital technology and finance for improved climate reportage.

The conference proper featured four different sessions (three classes and a talk). The first class focused on the intersection between natural resource exploitation, exploration licenses and protected area. Specifically,  Alexandre Brutelle the director and co-founder of the Environmental Investigative Forum (EIF) and Juliana Mori, Co-Founder and Editorial Director of InfoAmazonia took participants in a hands-on class about Detecting Oil and Gas Concessions in Protected Areas using GeoJournalism. Interestingly both Alexandre and Juliana previously worked with OCRI partners in Francophone Africa and Brazil in 2022 and 2023 respectively.

The two other classes were a taster to CIJ’s new Climate Investigations Course (CIC) to be launched fully in 2025. Tais Gadea Lara, an OCRI-LATAM beneficiary in 2022 took participants on how to prepare and report the annual United Nations Conference of Parties convening. Watch here. On his part, Akintunde Babatunde, OCRI Anglophone regional coordinator delivered a session about Investigating the Climate Crisis. Watch here.

The talk, chaired by OCRI’s Project Manager Adeolu Adekola, was titled Climate Arson and Cover-Ups featuring Emma Howard from Unearthed, Roxanne Joseph from Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism, Sebastián Rodríguez from Climate Home News and Nimra Shahid, an award-winning freelance journalist. It highlighted several methods and tools for investigating climate stories using 3 specific case studies of stories done by hardworking journalists in different parts of the world. Watch here.