More than 60 supported stories published during OCRI Year Two

The second year of implementing the Open Climate Reporting Initiative (OCRI) by the CIJ has seen the publication of more 60 supported stories across the 3 regions of Brazil and Lusophone Africa, South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

This forms part of the direct translation of the knowledge and skill gained by beneficiaries following series of in-person, online and hybrid activities in the form of train-the-trainer, curriculum development meetings, training workshops and conference sessions. These stories have been able to go deeper into the subjects covered and achieved wider impact by incorporating innovations such as data analysis, open-source intelligence and satellite imagery into their methodologies.

For instance, this report used data to show how 58% of the 26,553 hectares of the native vegetation lost in across Brazil between 2018 and 2022 are from 4 states and another story from Egypt used satellite images, among other tool, to highlight the forced displacement and loss of livelihood of potentially 30,000 fishermen plying their trade in Lake Manzala, located across four Egyptian governorates, due to a government project that commenced 2016.

While most of the South Asia region stories covered different climate change themes (for example the general health implications and women’s health specifically due to increasing temperatures/heatwaves as well as interrogating climate change loss and damage themes of flooding in Pakistan), some of the Gulf region (under MENA) stories covered food security, water scarcity/security and even inclusivity-related issues at COP28.

A few more examples

• Nampula far from renewable energy goals published in more than 5 media outlets x-rayed how Nampula the northern province of Mozambique making up 20.5% of the population are yet to see dividend of promised million dollars and euros renewable energy investments.
• In Bangladesh, climate change impact has led to the migration of more than 50,000 people from Kutubdia island to other cities in a decade, contributing and perhaps validating projections that the South Asia region will account for the third-most number of Internal Climate Migrants (40 million) by 2050.
• A gender perspective is brought forward in How climate change doubles the suffering of Sudanese women specifically the Darfur region and the Nile region of Sudan.
• An exposé detailing how the Jari/Pará Project in Brazil used an area larger than Sweden to raise R$22 million from companies (namely BMW, BTG Pactual and Telefônica) in carbon credits but with unclear plans for community farmers. Read here.