NEW YORK — The Covering Climate Now awards honoured 49 winners of the 2026 CCNow Journalism Awards on 17 September, naming Kim Min-wook, Roli Srivastava and Sammy Roth as Journalists of the Year and awarding Fiona Harvey of The Guardian its second-ever Lifetime Achievement honour.
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- Covering Climate Now announced 49 winners of its 2026 CCNow Journalism Awards on 17 September 2026; the programme is now in its sixth year.
- Three Journalists of the Year: Kim Min-wook (broadcast journalist and filmmaker, MBC News, South Korea), Roli Srivastava (founder and editor, The Migration Story, India), and Sammy Roth (founder of the Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter; formerly Los Angeles Times).
- Fiona Harvey of The Guardian received CCNow’s second Lifetime Achievement award, a special honour for transformative impact on the profession.
- Judges named up to three winners in each of 14 subject-based categories, plus awards for large projects and collaborations and Emerging Journalists of the Year.
- Winners were selected by a judging panel of 120 distinguished journalists from more than 30 countries, many of them past winners and finalists.
- Outlets represented include the Associated Press, BBC World Service, Miami Herald, Grist, Carbon Brief, Canary Media, Kenya’s Nation Media Group, Mexico’s El Universal and Brazil’s Agência Pública.
- The awards were supported by the Michaux Family Foundation and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Who won the 2026 Covering Climate Now awards
According to Covering Climate Now’s official announcement, the three Journalists of the Year combine reporting excellence with service to the profession. Kim Min-wook is described as an innovative broadcast journalist and filmmaker at South Korea’s prominent MBC News. Roli Srivastava founded and edits The Migration Story, an outlet covering India’s enormous migrant labour force through a climate-change lens. Sammy Roth founded the culture-centric newsletter Climate-Colored Goggles in 2025 after a pioneering stint at the Los Angeles Times.
Fiona Harvey’s Lifetime Achievement award is only the second the collaboration has ever issued. CCNow executive director Mark Hertsgaard said the organisation is “particularly proud” to honour Harvey, who he said has told the climate story “with exceptional rigor, panache, and impact” for decades while never losing sight that it is “fundamentally about people and the future we all will inhabit.”
CCNow described the programme as a globally recognised standard for excellence in climate storytelling — a model for journalists covering what the collaboration calls the biggest story of our time.
What the awards celebrate
The breadth of the winners’ list tells its own story: global mainstays alongside local flagships, climate-specialist outlets like Grist, Carbon Brief and Canary Media, and newsrooms on the front lines of the climate crisis — from Kenya’s Nation Media Group to Mexico’s El Universal to Brazil’s Agência Pública, as CCNow’s winners’ bulletin details.
For readers, the awards list doubles as a reading guide: the winning work, linked from the CCNow awards page, spans investigations, local reporting and solutions journalism across every continent. In a media environment where climate coverage competes for shrinking newsroom resources, the awards put a spotlight on the reporting that holds power to account and points toward workable answers.
Related on Watan News: Covering Climate Now 2026 Awards: Harvey Lifetime, three Journalists of the Year.
