Deadline: March 31, 2025
Applications are open for the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards 2025. The Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards, now in their fifth year, honor excellent reporting on critical dimensions of the climate story, from throughout the world.
Entry submissions will cover 14 subject based categories. This helps elevate work on specific and important aspects of the climate story — for example, solutions, justice, and health. They plan to honor multiple winners in each category, reflecting a range of styles, story lengths, outlet sizes, and geographic regions, to showcase the many ways journalists across the world explored similar subjects.
In addition to the subject-based categories, they will honor work in a “Large projects & collaborations” category; their “Emerging Journalists of the Year” category will recognize early-career journalists whose work shows exceptional promise; and, for the first time, they are accepting public entries for their “Journalists of the Year” award, given to three journalists who demonstrate exemplary commitment to the climate story and whose work has had a transformative impact on the profession.
Categories
- Solutions
- Justice
- Fossil fuels
- Extreme weather and its impacts
- Politics, policy, and climate action
- Disinformation
- Business & economics
- International relations, including COP29
- Global negotiations, including COP28
- Conflict & climate change
- Displacement & migration
- Forests, oceans, and the natural world
- Health
- Food & agriculture
- Climate in every beat
- Emerging Journalists of the Year
- Large projects & collaborations
- Journalists of the Year
Eligibility
- Submissions are accepted from journalists everywhere, representing news outlets big and small, as well as freelancers. Outlets may also submit several entries by different journalists.
- All eligible work must have been published or broadcast in 2024. There are exceptions in the “Large projects & collaborations,” “Emerging Journalists,” and “Journalists of the Year” categories; entries in those categories may include work from past years or 2025 for up to two of the five required pieces.
- Journalistic work in all mediums is eligible, including but not limited to writing, audio, video, photography, multimedia, editorial cartoons, and data. All journalistic styles are also eligible, including but not limited to breaking news, feature reporting, opinion/commentary, investigations, newsletters, and documentaries. We cannot accept books or academic work.
- Submission entry information must be provided in English. If the original work is not in English, please provide English-language translations in addition to the original work as an attachment.
- Finally, stories must be about climate change, not just the environment. While all climate stories are environmental stories, not all environmental stories are climate stories. Stories that primarily focus on environmental issues such as toxic pollution or endangered species where the impacts or root causes are not climate change–related are typically not considered climate stories, even if the stories may briefly mention climate change. Environmental stories that do significantly consider climate implications, such as the effects of deforestation on carbon storage, are eligible for submission.
Exceptional climate storytelling that upholds the highest standards of journalism. Great work may be marked by any of the following qualities:
- Makes climate change accessible for audiences, with stories rooted in science but not bogged down by it.
- Demonstrates the human dimensions of the climate story.
- Holds power to account and calls out disinformation and unethical behavior.
- Emphasizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on communities of color, Indigenous peoples, the poor, women, children, and other marginalized people.
- Examines solutions emerging from all sectors of public life, including policy solutions and solutions stemming from community initiatives.
- Breaks climate news out of the rut of partisan framing and demonstrates how the climate emergency is a collective problem that transcends partisan politics and other social fault lines.
Application
The deadline for completed entries is March 31, 2025, at 11:59pm US Eastern Time.
For more information, visit Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards.
