‘Green to Grey’ captured Europe’s changing landscape

Hi there,

This week, I’m handing over the reins to Eliz Mizon to tell you about a massive collaborative project she’s worked on with Arena for Journalism in Europe.

It’s an organisation that develops, stewards and publishes major cross-border, collaborative investigations like Green to Grey, bringing journalists across the continent together to dig into stories with global implications, and as a result, global change.

Eliz works on comms and campaigns for independent journalism, focusing on social justice, ethics and impact. She’s written about the failures of UK climate coverage, led projects and events for non profits like the Media Reform Coalition and the Charitable Journalism Project, and was formerly the strategy lead at the Bristol Cable. Over to her!

Every year, Europe loses 1,500 km² of its nature and cropland to construction. Between 2018 and 2023, we lost approximately 9,000km² – an area the size of Cyprus.

This is close to 30km² destroyed every week, the equivalent of 600 football pitches every single day. Nature, such as forests, grasslands and wetlands, accounts for the majority of these losses, at about 900km² a year. But agricultural land is not spared – it accounts for 600km² of losses every year, with grave consequences for food security and health. 

At these rates, it turns out, undeveloped land in Europe is disappearing up to one and a half times faster than previously calculated by the European Environment Agency.

These are the headline findings of the Green to Grey project, published on October 1 this year. In the first investigation of its kind, 41 journalists and scientists from 11 countries worked together for 10 months to reveal the scale of Europe’s nature and cropland loss.

Our specialism at Arena for Journalism in Europe is co-ordinating international teams to investigate global crises and scandals that need to be addressed at the local, national and international level.

At this moment in time, we’re beginning to see not only the immediate impacts of our work, but also hints of what the long term changes could be. So, from the centre of the action, I’d like to take this opportunity to outline how we plan, enact, and measure impact for a major project like this, as well as looking ahead to what’s next.

For Green to Grey, Arena worked with an impressive roster of publishing partners: Datadista (Spain), De Standaard (Belgium), Die Zeit (Germany), Facta (Italy), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland),  Le Monde (France), Long Play (Finland), NRK (Norway), Reporters United (Greece), The Black Sea (Turkey), The Guardian (UK), and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), who provided scientific expertise for the project.

The first step was to set down some basic aims to allow us to measure our impact: for example, one month after we published we wanted at least 1 million people to have read the story between all our publications. We also wanted 25 mentions of the project by other media, and 20 shares from social accounts with at least 10,000 followers.

Our first success was built into the foundation of the collaboration: by bringing all these outlets together, we ended up with 47 publications in 10 languages. This made for a widely accessible project across the continent, producing greater reach than any one of our teams could have alone. One month since we published, we’ve counted more than 3 million readers, viewers and listeners across the project overall.

There have been 57 mentions in other media so far, and we’ve found 21 shares from social media accounts with more than 10,000 followers, meaning we’ve surpassed our aims for reach.

While we could interpret this as simply the natural results of a shocking, groundbreaking story, it’s also important to note that we set our goals to be both ambitious and achievable.

There was co-ordinated effort between Arena and partners to tap into a wide network of journalists, scientists and campaigners. I wrote and led a plan to ensure the work reached a diverse collection of people in the journalism, environmental and political fields, and the partner teams focused on translating to their local networks.

We’ve been approached by newsrooms in countries that weren’t originally involved, including Sweden, the Netherlands, and Portugal, to ask if they can use the dataset to produce their own stories. With limited resources, we can’t co-ordinate ongoing stories indefinitely, but we can help teams who want to contribute by helping them navigate our data and methodology.

We’ve also approached specific people who have real power to act on what we’ve found. At our Climate Arena conference this year, just 10 days after the publication of Green to Grey, we approached attendees from the EU Green Party. They were very positive about the possibilities for sharing our findings with MEPs and national lawmakers.

And individual teams have seen results, too. Our partners at Le Monde, in France, found a spike in subscriptions tied to their Green to Grey publications. Our partners at The Black Sea, in Turkey, had their highest ever audience traffic. And two partners, Facta in Italy and NRK in Norway – whose original article inspired the project – have already received invitations to present the project at conferences. 

Finally, alongside writing a scientific paper on the methodology, now under review, our scientific partners at NINA have developed a citizen science project in the form of an app. The Global Nature Loss app invites anyone to help them track land loss across the world. In this way, our project has already found its next “scale up”. 

The story of our project is one of growth through collaboration: from the original Norwegian project, we expanded the project continent-wide; now, the Global Nature Loss project might mean we soon have a better picture of runaway construction worldwide. As a result, people around the world will have a better foundation to act on it.

So, we believe this is just the beginning and that Green to Grey will have a “long tail”. Arena’s previous collaborations show precedent for this: a perfect example being the Forever projects, co-ordinated in partnership with long-time Arena collaborator Stéphane Horel of Le Monde. More on that below!

“We made the invisible visible. In February 2023, Le Monde published a landmark interactive map marked with red and blue dots. 

It was the Forever Pollution Project, the first major investigation to reveal the extent of pollution on the European continent caused by a family of chemical contaminants that, until then, almost no one had heard of: “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances”, also known as PFAS, or more widely, “forever chemicals”.

Scientists have described this as “the worst pollution crisis humanity has ever faced”. Invented in the late 1940s by American chemical giants DuPont and 3M, these ultra-persistent toxic compounds are not biodegradable, and we now know they accumulate in the body. PFAS now contaminate our water resources, soil, lake sediments and rain. Humans exposed to them face health risks from a dozen diseases, ranging from immune system damage to certain cancers.

~ Lucy here: if you missed it, back in October we covered another investigation into PFAS contamination in Bentham, Yorkshire. This is absolutely a global issue ~

The map would be followed in 2025 by the Forever Lobbying Project, shining a light on the lobbying and disinformation campaign led by PFAS manufacturers to counter a European initiative to ban these substances. 

The two “Forever” projects I co-ordinated in collaboration with Arena and Corporate Europe Observatory involved 29 and 46 journalists, respectively, across Europe. The work was further strengthened by 7, then 18, experts – scientists, social scientists, criminologists, lawyers – who together embarked on an unprecedented adventure in experimental journalism that we have called “expert-reviewed journalism”. Last month, a fund to produce more investigations like ours was launched as a direct response.

Parliamentary debates, questions to public officials, legal proceedings, numerous awards, petitions, demonstrations in several European countries, blood tests on European ministers, projections of our revelations on the façade of the headquarters of the European Commission ... The impact has been consistent, and is not over.

The “Forever” projects have helped to inspire several legislative initiatives, which are now becoming law. In France, a law “aimed at protecting the population from the risks associated with PFAS” was tabled by the French National Assembly in February 2024, and passed into law a year later. 

And just a few days ago, the British government’s Drinking Water Inspectorate ordered water companies to reduce PFAS in drinking water sources for 6 million people across the UK, according to the BBC. We hope this is just the beginning.”

That’s it from the Spark this week, except to thank Eliz and Stéphane for their time and their work keeping us healthier and happier. We’re bang in the middle of the Cop climate summit in Brazil now, and it’s been great to feature so many environment stories in the Spark. And, at TBIJ, we’ve published lots of stories as part of our Cop30 work so far, including yesterday’s investigation highlighting the fight to save the Congo’s mangroves. 

We’ll be diving into our Cop30 coverage tomorrow from 6pm on Zoom, where you can hear from our Environment team and the incredible stories my colleagues have written behind-the-scenes. You can get your free tickets here:

As usual, our membership community, the Bureau Insiders, had first access to this month’s event. If you’d like to join them and get a sneak peak into how things work here at The Bureau, then you can do so here. 

See you next week!