Call summary :

We are seeking innovative project ideas from media outlets, journalism institutions and other organizations that work directly with media or content creators in the Asia-Pacific region.

Overview

In 2024, countries across the Asia Pacific experienced scorching heatwaves and droughts and grappled with monsoon rains that triggered catastrophic floods and landslides.

According to the Asian Development Bank, climate impacts alone could lead to a 17% GDP drop across Asia and the Pacific by 2070 under a high carbon emissions scenario, which could rise to 41% of GDP by the end of the century.

And as the climate crisis accelerates, it exacerbates challenges across the region: claiming lives, threatening livelihoods and children’s educations, increasing the burden of poverty, food insecurity and disease, and further destabilizing ecosystems and biodiversity.

These interconnected global crises pose a grave threat to vulnerable nations, and existing funding commitments do little to meet the need for adaptation, mitigation and resilience.

To boost public awareness of these issues – and the urgent need for cross-sectoral solutions – the Earth Journalism Network is pleased to announce a new round of media grants through its Asia-Pacific Phase 2 project, which aims to boost the quantity and quality of environmental coverage in the region and amplify the perspectives of at-risk communities.

This project has received generous financial support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

Eligibility

This round of grants will be focused on supporting media outlets, journalism institutions and other organizations that work directly with media or content creators in the Asia-Pacific region. Applicant organizations must be legally permitted to receive grants from foreign organizations.

Civil society organizations, community-based groups and research institutions will not be eligible for this round.

For the purpose of this call, we are only accepting applications from low-and middle-income countries in the Asia-Pacific region. We are unfortunately unable to accept applications from Pakistan and Central Asian or Middle Eastern countries.

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 submitting AI-generated content as their own.
Objectives

Proposed activities should seek to:
- Strengthen the capacity of journalists and media organizations to produce high-quality, evidence-based and engaging environmental stories on the consequences of human impacts on the environment and viable solutions to mitigate and respond to these impacts.
- Improve the quality and quantity of content and/or media coverage on key environmental themes to focus public attention on the interdependence of the health and well-being of humans and their environments.
- Direct public attention to the disproportionate impacts of environmental degradation on women, the poor, youth, Indigenous Peoples, ethnic minorities and other vulnerable groups and increase these groups’ access to high-quality, publicly available environmental information.
- Contribute to positive changes in environmental governance, policy actions, environmental standards in the private sector or consumer habits for a more sustainable way of life.


Project themes

For this round, we are particularly interested in proposals that focus on one or more of the following themes:
- Under-reported environmental issues and their linkages with health, organized crime, migration, conflict and other issues
- The interdependence of the health and well-being of humans, animals and their environments
- Environmental governance and natural resource management
- The energy transition and climate financing
- Viable environmental solutions for community resilience in the face of interconnected environmental crises

We welcome proposals that seek to:
- Incorporate the ethical use of AI as a tool to support journalists in their reporting on environmental issues.
- Work with social media content creators or include social media outreach to access a diverse and widespread audience online
- Work with marginalized groups, such as women, youth, Indigenous People, ethnic minority groups. people with disabilities, or poor households

Examples of activities or outputs that can be supported ...

Grant amount and logistics

We expect to notify successful applicants in February