How Climate Change Is Changing Work

Grantees Tell Stories of Climate-Stressed Workers as COP27 Begins

As the world gears up for the COP27 global climate summit this month in Egypt, Pulitzer Center grantees are publishing accounts from India, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar on the stakes for workers who toil under extreme heat and with withering water supplies.

These threats to livelihoods and industries are increasingly part of the climate change story. For the past nine months, more than a dozen freelance and staff journalists have received support from the Pulitzer Center’s Your Work/Environment initiative to track global risks and losses.

The fund was launched this year to support reporting that explores how climate change is upending workers’ livelihoods, their health, and their workplaces. The aim is to encourage reporters to showcase life beyond the headline-grabbing incidences of floods or fires or droughts. And did they ever.

Grantee Katie Nadworny shared what remains of Turkey’s pivotal honey industry after devastating wildfires cindered 14,000 acres of pine forest in 2021. “Turkey’s Honey Apocalypse Is a Warning to the World” is how The Atlantic headlined her excellent account.

TIME’s Aryn Baker, a longtime staff correspondent, examined how Qatar’s government built its World Cup infrastructure and what that effort, over the last decade, meant for legions of migrant workers. TIME published a cover story and video trailer this week to prepare readers for the debates that will emerge from COP27. An in-depth documentary, Too Hot to Work, will be released during the second week of the U.N. meeting—just as the World Cup games are set to begin.

Timothy McDonnell, the senior climate and energy reporter at Quartz, reported with photographer Sima Diab on how Egypt is facing climate change. They crisscrossed one of the most fertile and densely populated rural areas on Earth, the Nile Delta, to investigate looming water shortages.

This week, grantees collaborated with the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) on two media seminars to explain their field reporting and to help other journalists prepare pitches for Pulitzer Center funding on climate and labor issues. On November 11, the Pulitzer Center and GLF will collaborate again with a seminar to highlight cross-cultural outreach efforts to promote climate journalism and, notably, the threat to global rainforests. The Pulitzer Center’s Flora Pereira and grantees Edilma Prada Céspedes (Agenda Propia) and Bagja Hidayat (TEMPO) will be featured.

Your Work/Environment encourages reporters to tell stories that matter in the places where they live and work. This fund can help established news organizations tell undercovered stories, particularly those that examine the economics of climate change. Read more climate stories and learn how to apply for a reporting grant.

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The Pulitzer Center-supported consortium project Roadblocks to Police Accountability received two 2022 Editor & Publisher Magazine EPPY Awards for “best college/university-produced community or Niche Website” and “best collaborative college/university & professional website.” For Roadblocks to Police Accountability, professor of journalism at Southern Illinois University William Freivogel worked with students and local journalists around the country to produce a 72-page report for Gateway Journalism Review. Contributors include Reporting Fellow alums: Emily Cooper, Kallie Cox, and Brian Munoz from SIU Carbondale, Maranie Rae Staab from Syracuse University Newhouse School of Communications, and Zora Raglow-DeFranco, a Pulitzer Center Legal Fellow from Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Roadblocks to Police Accountability documents the literal and legal obstacles to reporting and reprimanding police misconduct. Reporters compared state trends of police unions, hearsay, qualified immunity, and locked-down databases. “The Pulitzer Center’s support of the police accountability project made it possible to create a Zoom newsroom of college journalists in the summer of fall of 2020 after the George Floyd murder,” Freivogel said. “This police accountability project was the biggest and broadest in scope and provided a most detailed journalistic accounting of the legal roadblocks to police accountability.”

This message first appeared in the November 4, 2022, edition of the Pulitzer Center's weekly newsletter. Subscribe today.

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