How do you cover climate change in a way that affects people? For over two years, the ProPublica-journalist Abrahm Lustgarten worked on an ambitious project to show how climate change was already affecting America in dramatic ways. Farmers, displaced by failing harvests in Central America, had started emigration in masses to the USA. The so-called «Caravan» of emigrants became a major selling point for Donald Trump's border wall. And climate change was also affecting US citizens on their own soil: The fires that raged across California in 2020 was just the beginning, Lustgartens reporting explained. Wildfires could make large parts of California too dangerous to live in in the coming years - including the journalist’s own home.
The non-profit organization ProPublica teamed up with the Pulitzer center and the New York Times Magazine, who published three cover stories written by Lustgarten. The series, which became the basis of a coming book, were acclaimed for their in-depth reporting, which used advanced models to show how large parts of the world would become uninhabitable by climate change. In a conversation with Bent Skjærstad at the Nordic Media Days, Lustgarten will explain how ProPublica worked to model the effects of climate change, and how they made the information interesting to the public.