Thanks to CREDO members, Inside Climate News is the leader of independent climate journalism

As the leading voice of independent climate journalism in the country, the groundbreaking work of Inside Climate News is helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, hold polluters accountable, empower voters, and protect communities suffering from environmental injustice.

In September 2021, CREDO members voted to distribute $46,950 to ICN to significantly expand its environmental justice coverage, undertake new in-depth climate investigations, expose climate misinformation, and support its work in local markets to strengthen environmental journalism nationwide.

Here are a few of the organization’s accomplishments thanks to CREDO’s financial support:

Inside Climate News accomplishments

Thanks in part to support from CREDO members, the team at ICN has had the resources to produce the hard-hitting, in-depth environmental journalism that they’re known for. Some of the stories they’ve published since receiving the grant in September include:

• A look at Canada’s massive tar sands that have replaced Indigenous people’s traditional lands and threaten their future, and whether the destruction they’ve caused constitutes Ecocide

• How the northernmost city in the world, Norilsk, in the Russian Arctic, became one of the most polluted places on earth (hint: one smelting company)

• A Superfund site poisoning air, soil, and groundwater with a carcinogen known as TCE in the predominantly Latino community of Grand Prairie, Texas, and the EPA’s failure to inform residents of the danger

• Deforestation in the Amazon that has risen so severely under President Jair Bolsonaro that advocacy groups, Indigenous tribes and some of the world’s most prominent human rights lawyers are calling for him to be prosecuted

• The oil wastewater that has been used to irrigate crops in Kern County, CA for more than 30 years, and the numerous possible conflicts of interest between the oil industry and the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, who insists that eating crops grown with oil field wastewater “creates no identifiable increased health risks,” despite scant evidence to support those claims 

ICN’s Environmental Justice Reporting Initiative entered its 18th month last December and has grown from an initial team of three reporters to a team of five, including a new leader in managing editor Sonya Ross. Its Local Reporting Network continued to punch above its weight in 2021 and has made a number of important hires to help support the anticipated growth of the network in the coming year. 

ICN saw an unprecedented growth of interest in its work over the last year, with thousands of new subscribers every week, growing partnerships with large national outlets and local media outlets, and expansion onto the Apple News platform. Readers are proving that people everywhere are hungry for fact-based, in-depth coverage of the biggest crisis facing our planet.

If you’d like to learn more and read some incredible climate journalism, please visit ICN’s website, or follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.