Call for Applications: Biodiversity Story Grants 2024

The worsening biodiversity crisis poses a monumental threat to the planet’s welfare and thus to all of humanity. Yet, the main culprit driving this climate emergency is human activity — practices such as poaching, trafficking and deforestation are all undermining the health, stability and resilience of the planet’s ecosystems, on which they all depend.

Journalists have an important role to play in alerting the public to the magnitude of this crisis, as well as engaging them in discussions, debates and actions around the nature-based solutions that might help curb biodiversity loss.

With the upcoming United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP16) taking place in Colombia from 21 October 21 to 1 November this year, the media is also crucial to monitoring the progress of countries’ conservation targets and commitments to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and ensuring home audiences have access to relevant, timely and localized global stories.

To help journalists raise awareness and accountability of citizens, policymakers and corporations in tackling the biodiversity crisis, EJN is offering story grants to produce engaging, timely and impactful stories through its Biodiversity Media Initiative, which is now entering its third phase of operation since its inception in 2016.

Story Themes 

• For this grant opportunity, they are interested in pitches for ambitious stories that make use of innovative multimedia, collaborative, cross-border or investigative approaches to deepen coverage of biodiversity or conservation topics. Proposals that utilize data journalism and geojournalism are also encouraged.
• This year, themes they are interested in supporting include (but are not limited to):
  • Under-reported stories of trade and trafficking of endangered flora and fauna and its impacts
  • New or little-known threats to species diversity, e.g. cryptocurrency mining, seabed mining
  • New methods to track environmental crimes such as illegal mining and logging, and other drivers of biodiversity loss
  • Innovative, potentially scalable conservation solutions led by communities, governments or corporations
  • Efforts to boost “green” and “blue” economies to enable development that conserves rather than exploits the environment
  • New or proposed policies which could be either harmful or beneficial to biodiversity
  • Biodiversity and conservation in urban areas
  • Mechanisms for financing biodiversity conservation such as biodiversity credits
  • Benefit-sharing from digital sequence information and its possibilities and risks
• Special consideration will be given to applicants looking at monitoring and evaluating the commitments and progress from the Global Biodiversity Framework in the leadup to the Convention on Biological Diversity COP taking place in October 2024 in Colombia.
• As they are looking to raise global awareness about new threats or solutions, proposals that focus on topics or stories that have not been widely covered are preferred. Issues that have already received a lot of media coverage or don’t provide unique angles are less likely to be selected.
• You can read published stories supported by the Biodiversity Media Initiative in previous years here.

Funding Information

• Award amounts are expected to be in the range of 1,000-2,000 EUR with investigative or other types of in-depth reporting more likely to be approved for higher amounts (up to 5,000 EUR).
• They plan to issue grants in May 2024 with the expectation that all stories will be published by 1 December 2024, though longer timelines may be considered for more in-depth reporting approaches. Applicants should consider this when drafting their workplan.

Eligibility Criteria

• For the purposes of this grant call, they are only accepting applications for stories focused on the countries listed, though journalists from any country can apply.
• They would like to hear from applicants based in countries in which they have not offered grants to previously. They encourage applications in particular from West Africa Central America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, and specifically from the following countries: Dominican Republic, Honduras, Kyrgyzstan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• Applications are open to journalists (online, print, television, radio) and other expert media practitioners with experience in investigative reporting and covering environmental issues.
• They are seeking to support both early-career and senior journalists with many years of reporting experience. They encourage applications from freelancers and staff from all types of media organizations—international, national, local and community-based.
• They’ll accept both individual and group applications, but for the latter they ask that the application is made in the name of one lead applicant who will receive the grant on the group’s behalf, if awarded.
• EJN reserves the right to disqualify applicants from consideration if they have been found to have engaged in unethical or improper professional conduct, including, but not limited to, plagiarism and/or submitting AI-generated content as their own.

For more information, visit EJN.