Pulitzer Center Grantees Receive ‘Best of the Best’ Award for Environmental Project

The Society of Environmental Journalists has announced that ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine were awarded the 2021 Nina Mason Pulliam Award for their Pulitzer Center-supported project Where Will Everyone Go? How Climate Refugees Might Move Across International Borders.

The award, handed out on October 20, 2021, is given to one of the first-place SEJ winners, and is considered the “best of the best.”

“This exceptionally researched and reported series lays bare the alarming plight of climate refugees,” said Gene D’Adamo, president and CEO of the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

The multimedia project explored the changes and challenges to human migration as the planet warms, ProPublica said in the award announcement. Using a mathematical model, photography, and video, grantees Abrahm Lustgarten and Meridith Kohut, along with a group of other journalists, depicted the growing threat of climate displacement and the potential for catastrophe both in the United States and abroad.

This is the second SEJ award that the series has received. In August it won first place in the category “Outstanding Explanatory Reporting, Large.”

“This deeply reported and powerfully written series delivers a gut punch as it asks, and seeks to answer, some troubling questions about what will happen as a changing climate makes a growing number of places less amenable to human habitation,” the judges wrote.