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Columbia University honors ICIJ’s World Bank probe

Evicted and Abandoned has been named an Oakes Award finalist, marking the 11th time the project has been recognized by journalism prizes.

Evicted and Abandoned, ICIJ’s investigation of the World Bank’s environmental and human rights record, has been named as a finalist for Columbia Journalism School’s John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism. 

ICIJ was one of three news outlets honored by the Oakes Award judges. InsideClimate News was named as the winner of the Oakes Award for revealing that Exxon’s own research confirmed fossil fuels’ role in global warming decades ago. Climate Central was also named a finalist for its reporting on global warming.

The honor marks the 11th time that the World Bank investigation – a collaboration between ICIJ and two dozen media partners – has been recognized as a finalist or winner of a major journalism honor. These include awards from the Overseas Press Club of America and the Online News Association and the New York Press Club’s highest accolade, the Gold Keyboard Award for enterprise or investigative reporting.

The reporting partnership’s stories exposed the human and environmental toll of dams, gold mines and other projects bankrolled by the World Bank Group, the planet’s most influential development lender. It revealed that the bank has regularly violated its own policies for protecting people and ecosystems.

The investigation was carried out by a team of more than 80 journalists. 

U.S. partners included The Huffington Post, Fusion, the Food & Environment Reporting Network, the GroundTruth Project and the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. 

International partners included, among others, the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, Agência Pública in Brazil, Premium Times in Nigeria, SonntagsZeitung and Le Matin Dimanche in Switzerland and Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR in Germany.

A list of journalists who worked on the project can be found here.

Here is a full list of honors for Evicted and Abandoned:

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