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27 January 2021

Hello, and welcome to the news and tools delivery from EDJNet.

COVID-19 has touched every aspect of our lives, but not all demographic groups have been equally affected. Refugees and migrants might have disappeared from public attention with the spotlight firmly on the pandemic – but in fact they have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. VoxEurop's Emanuela Barbigoglio investigates.

Speaking about global threats, climate change remains a looming presence even more threatening than the pandemic – but how are the EU's efforts at curbing emissions coming along? In their multi-part investigation on CO2 emissions and the energy sector, OBC Transeuropa takes a look at the carbon cost of energy production in Europe, the breakdown of energy sources by country, and the grim reality of banks still backing fossil fuel industries.

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EDJNet stories

The uncountable: How Covid-19 affected migrants and refugees’ health

With COVID-19 in the spotlight, refugees and undocumented migrants disappeared from public attention. Precisely what swept these communities away from the agenda, however, disproportionately affected them, argues Emanuela Barbiroglio.

photo: © Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock

More than 30,000 refugees and migrants participated in a survey by the World Health Organization (WHO) and spoke about the serious impact of the pandemic on their mental and physical health.
At least 50 percent of the respondents to the WHO’s survey considered that they had been impacted by the pandemic, in terms of work, safety and financial situation.
Counting cases and deaths among migrants, however, is tricky. All volunteers and experts interviewed – across Bulgaria, France, Greece and Italy – agree: health conditions are often so compromised that nobody cares about COVID-19 and, if they do, there is practically no way to test people on the move across our continent.

Read the article >

Emissions in Europe: how much CO2 does energy cost us?

Ornaldo Gjergji | OBC Transeuropa

In terms of CO2, energy production is the human activity with the worst impact on the environment in Europe. Emissions in the EU may be falling, but there are still major obstacles to achieving climate neutrality. Meanwhile, to the east, dozens of new coal plants will be built in the near future.

How energy is produced in the EU (and how much greenhouse gas it produces)

Ornaldo Gjergji | OBC Transeuropa

The natural resources used to produce energy directly impact CO2 emission levels and the long-term environmental sustainability of the energy sector. National differences within the EU are large, and suggest the very different approaches being taken.

European banks are still major backers of the fossil fuel industry

Gianluca De Feo | OBC Transeuropa

As public institutions struggle to implement their plans effectively, private banks are still not pulling their weight. With the slowness and mounting obstacles facing public finances, combined with the unreliability of the private system, how secure is the future of energy transition?

Climate renovation of buildings: lessons from around Europe

Antoine de Ravignan | Alternatives Economiques

To meet its climate targets, the EU must double the speed it is renovating its residential and office buildings. Sweden has already almost completely decarbonised its sector. But it is on its own.

All our articles can be freely republished or reused. Some are available in Croatian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Interested? Write to us!

From our partners

From the European Data News Hub

World lost equivalent of 255 million jobs in 2020: UN

The coronavirus pandemic has taken a huge toll on global jobs, with a new study by the United Nations estimating that the equivalent of 255 million jobs were lost last year.

EU warns AstraZeneca over vaccine delivery delay

The European Union has issued an angry warning to pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca over its unexpected delay in delivering millions of doses of its Covid-19 vaccine to the bloc.

From Sonar Europe

Two million dead around the world

The figure is reached with the vaccine on the horizon, but also with the worst daily death figures since the virus began its expansion. Check a comprehensive report on COVID-19-related mortality in Europe and around the world.

Coronavirus in Europe. Where we can already see the third wave of the pandemic and the new variant of SARS-CoV-2

After the first wave of cases in spring 2020, and after the second – in autumn, we are just entering the third wave. Gazeta Wyborcza is checking the pandemic situation in Europe and where the restrictions have been extended.

Tools and Tips

Ornaldo Gjergji: Climate Change Down to the Local Level (video)

Ornaldo Gjergji, data analyst at OBC Transeuropa, presents the approach and process behind his investigation on rising temperatures in Europe. Ornaldo built a dataset that shows the variation in average temperature between the 1960s and the 2010s for about 100,000 municipalities across Europe. This video is part of a series of interviews on data journalism from a European perspective, which are produced by OBC Transeuropa for EDJNet.

👉 Watch the video on YouTube.

The Quote Finder

As the United States rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, MEPs took to Twitter – but what were their reactions? The Quote Finder allows you to check that.

The Quote Finder is a tool created by EDJNet, based on a purposefully created open source package for the R programming language. The source code is available on GitHub.

From the data journalism community

The 2020 Sigma Awards

For its second edition, the Sigma Awards celebrates the best of data journalism and teams up with international communities to support data journalists worldwide. If you feel like your organisation has published remarkable data-driven projects in 2020 that deserve to be in this database and maybe win a prize, go on and take a moment to fill that form. The deadline to apply is 1st February at 11:59pm ET.

Computation+Journalism conference

Journalists interested in the intersection of computation and journalism can participate in this event. Northeastern University's Computation+Journalism Symposium (C+J) will be held online on 19 February, in partnership with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. This year's theme is "Data journalism in an expanded field."

UN World Data Forum – Webinar

The webinar "Strenghthening the use of data in journalism" brought together various actors that contribute to strengthening the use of data in journalism. These include: data producers working to provide quality, timely, reliable and trusted data; civil society partners, and academia compiling open access data for journalists and increasing data literacy among journalists and; journalists promoting and using data to tell compelling stories. Check the video recording out here.

You are free to reuse and republish all the content available on EDJNet. If you’d like to know more, check our terms of use or contact us (info@europeandatajournalism.eu).

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