OCRI 2025 review: Institutionalising investigative reporting for climate action

From our HQ base in the UK, the CIJ’s Open Climate Reporting Initiative (OCRI) in its third implementing year (Y3) has continued to grow, providing skills to beneficiaries across the world from Argentina to Ghana, DR Congo to India and Australia to Canada. 2025 was a particularly important one for OCRI to build on the new ground gained in 2024 and initial delivery of a region-contextualized version of the Climate Investigations Course (CIC). In line with OCRI’s objective of leveraging investigative reporting for evidence-based advocacy, 2025 has enabled us to support scrutiny of climate policy and regulations around the world as well as influence the decisions of economic actors. And so, we recap the year taking stock of successes and lessons as we look forward to 2026:

Launching and delivering CIC

In January 2025, we launched the CIC as a scheduled course having developed the curriculum during 2024 under OCRI. The CIC is an immersive course that teaches various aspects of deep investigative research into climate change and its causes. The programme blends the expertise of about a dozen world-class practitioners across our global training network, plus the contribution of another 19 CIJ trainers who delivered region-tailored versions with our partner organisations. You can read more about the CIC here. The three successful runs of the course in 2025 have helped 210 participants from EVERYWHERE – Africa, Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas! Given the sustained demand from consistent bookings, along with registration of interest in iterations that have been fully booked, we’ve just concluded plans to deliver the course a further three times in 2026.

This fits directly into our central mission to deliver practical investigative training to journalists and researchers as affordably and accessibly as possible.

stories, STOries and STORIES!

A main outcome from the four story-lab workshops held in Nigeria, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire and Sri Lanka in 2024 was the post-workshop support provided to selected journalists who went on to work on stories. From the outset, we emphasised a baseline requirement for the Y3 stories – investigative, cross-border and collaborative. Our experience undertaking the initiative in Y1 and 2 made this requirement important to go a step further in bringing about responses to the climate crisis. The 28 stories published have been multidimensional:

• a climate migration story cutting across Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador;
• a deep dive into how Human-Elephant Conflict interlinks with environmental degradation in Nigeria;
• exposing a trail of systemic failure and broken promises of Nepali authorities towards survivors of the 2021 floods and landslides;
• and an in-depth report showing the failure of the Great Green Wall project aimed at combating desertification and the effects of climate change in 11 African countries.

From these projects and others, we have seen how important telling these stories has become to ensuring stakeholders are not only held accountable but are made to take action by amplification from news desks and advocacy campaigns. We are excited to see the evidence of skills gained as the journalists put them to use in real time. Each journalist was empowered to go deeper, incorporating innovations such as data analysis, open-source intelligence, and satellite imagery into their methodologies.

 

Driving evidence-based advocacy and policy action

We recorded notable stakeholder actions and policy shifts in the course of the year either direct from OCRI stories or other project activities delivered by our brilliant regional partners. OCRI partners hosted a range of events to further engage stakeholders:

• Participants from 13 North and South American countries joined CONNECTAS, our LATAM partner, during the 19 June webinar that provided tips and tricks for undertaking collaborative climate change stories in the region.
• Our South Asia partner DataLEADS wrapped up activities with a webinar held on 2 July that brought together many passionate climate journalists from the region reporting from the frontlines.
• The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development, OCRI’s Anglophone Africa partner, hosted a stakeholder dialogue and policy brief presentation on 22 July that shows how climate change impacts human rights among other things in Nigeria, The Gambia and Ghana.
• OCRI’s Francophone Africa partner CENOZO held a virtual convening of stakeholders from six countries on 27 August to discuss the cross cutting implications of the published investigative stories.

Below are a few results emanating from OCRI in 2025:

• An investigative exposé of how a mining company in The Gambia is destroying the environment, displacing communities (especially women farmers) and evading accountability due to political ties influenced a petition to The Gambia Ministry of Petroleum, Energy and Mines and a press conference by the Gambia Environmental Alliance.
• The reported discrepancy in funds resulted in the Nepali authorities taking action. An orientation by the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Authority (NDRRMA) in Nepal was conducted to address the issue of delay. The institution conducted training for the municipal staff on proper data entry and grant processing through systems like the Disaster Portal and RMIS. NDRRMA officials and the District Disaster Management Committee hope that the initiative will resolve technical issues and speed up long-overdue support for the affected communities. The follow up story is here. According to the authority, by October 2025 and some months after the story was published, an additional 32 families have now received support. It is important to note that by March 2025 before the story was published – in the four years since the floods – only 33 Dalit families out of 463 had received 50,000 as the first instalment of the government support!
• Shortly after the report spotlighting the decades-long issue of military land occupation in the north and east of Sri Lanka was published, a Land Releasing Programme was conducted at the Jaffna District Secretariat, resulting in the official return of 40.7 acres of land to civilian ownership.

Forging deeper networks at #CIJSummer2025

For the fourth consecutive year, OCRI played a role at the 2025 edition of CIJ’s annual Summer Conference held 26-27 June by facilitating climate/environmental themed sessions and providing scholarships to participants through the Climate Investigations Training Scholarship scheme. Three sessions around climate reporting were featured during the conference. They covered a case study of reporting deforestation in very difficult terrain, how to report COP30 pulled out from the CIC module 1 and accessing the EU corporate sustainability reporting framework from our Dark Green training.

We tweaked the OCRI Focus Day format held in 2024 from solely a networking event to include practical training components. Therefore, we organised and hosted a Climate Investigations Masterclass as a ticketed pre-conference event on 25 June. It successfully brought together some key elements of the CIC training. Not only was it sold out six weeks before the conference, but we also had our trainers from Argentina, Nigeria, India and the UK take the 16 participants through tools and techniques required to conduct thorough investigative research into the climate crisis. We are happy with the outcome going by this feedback and more –

14 journalists from 11 countries took advantage of CIC/OCRI’s Climate Investigations Training Scholarship. The goal of the scheme was to provide the selected journalists an opportunity to either participate in one of two online CIC scheduled for summer and fall or attend the Summer Conference (including the Climate Investigations Masterclass) in June. Six scholarship recipients from Côte d’Ivoire, Peru, Nigeria, The Gambia and India were in London for the conference and 8 joined the full CIC online.

Looking ahead into 2026

Despite threats, security breach attempts and harassment of some of the investigative journalists trained and our partners, politically motivated media censorship and the impact of global events and geopolitical occurrences, OCRI improved the capacity of a diverse cohort of climate journalists. By engaging cross-sectoral highly skilled experts, the initiative has improved the quality of climate and environmental investigative stories, contributing to regional conversations as well as shifts in policy and advocacy.

Along the way, we’ve learnt and adapted to changing landscapes, bridged investigative research skill gaps, expanded our global footprint and network considerably while also updating our climate reporting body of knowledge. At the turn of the new year, we intend to showcase the impacts of OCRI through blog posts and a free webinar on 29 January 2026.

We’ll also be continuing our Climate Investigations Training Scholarship helping another 10 journalists access the spring 2026 class of the CIC. Look out for an announcement in the very near future. If you want to ensure you don’t miss them, sign up for our newsletter. For now, we are looking into the new year with our glasses raised for a job well done in 2025!