Last year, Climate Tracker had one of our strongest years ever, with major expansions in Latin America and our biggest ever team covering the UN climate talks last year.
This was all made possible by our 14 different project partners and donors, whom we are incredibly thankful for. Each one of these partners enabled us to develop our programs, and support hundreds of journalists around the world through our Journalism grants, Research and Reporting fellowships around the world.
Our project partners and funders included:
- Friedrich Enrich Stiftung
- Climate Collaboration
- European Climate Foundation
- Nourish Scotland
- African Development Bank
- One Earth
- The Rockefeller Foundation
- Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
- Break Free From Plastic (Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance)
- Oxfam Pilipinas
- Global Climate Change Alliance
- Centre for International Forestry Research
- 350.org
- Oscar M. Lopez Center for Climate Change
- The Pulitzer Foundation
As a global organisation, we aim to share our opportunities and projects across Asia, Africa and Latin America equally. In 2021, we were very close to this mark, spending between 22-24% of our funds on projects across Asia, Latin America and Africa respectively, with the final 30% being spent on global initiatives and campaigns.
In 2022, we hope to increase our regional spending, with a focus on national and regional journalism programs.
Last year we were able to bounce back when it came to projects. We had multiple projects that ran all throughout the year. Since we were not able to hold in person trainings for journalists, most of our projects last year were done online, with the exception of our Conference coverage teams to COP26. This was our first face to face event since COVID, and incurred significant logistics challenges and expenses.
Through these projects, we were able to create a Digital Platform that serves as a tool for journalists in South East Asia to connect them with regional climate experts, a range of global journalism and multimedia fellowships, Editorial collaborations with a select group of key publications across Asia, well as a regional Media Analysis of climate coverage across Latin America.
Fellowship Count for 2021
Climate Tracker supported 157 different paid Journalism Fellows in 2021, in addition to hundreds of non-paid training engagements and thousands of who have downloaded and engaged with our training content throughout the year.
While this number still represents a journalism opportunity given out every two days, it is smaller than our total fellowships for 2020. It was however, our biggest year ever for our work in Latin America, where we had over 70 different paid journalism fellows throughout the year.
These journalism fellows were located in over 46 different countries across the Global South. While Latin America was our most popular region with 10 or more fellowships in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, the Philippines had the highest number of individual fellows in 2021, and was our only country with more than 20 paid fellowships in the calendar year. Our highest ranking African countries were Egypt and Nigeria.
Following our commitment to Gender and Racial diversity, Climate Tracker has been actively tracking not only gender balance in our staff team, but also across our international fellowships. In 2021, over two-thirds (63.9%) of all of our global paid fellows identified as women.
This commitment was also reflected in our core team, of which over 70% are women. We are also proud that there is no gender-pay difference, as all of our team members are paid the same rates, regardless of gender, race, position or geography.
While 2021 was certainly a challenging year for everyone in our Climate Tracker network, we are proud that we were able to support so many young journalists around the world, especially through our growth in Latin America.
In 2022, we hope to build on this success, and offer even more international fellowships, especially across Africa and Asia.