EJN Extreme Weather in the Philippines Investigative Reporting Fellowship 2026: Closed — 12 Fellows Selected for P118,000 Story Grants

Status update: this fellowship is over. The Earth Journalism Network (EJN) closed applications for the Extreme Weather in the Philippines Investigative Reporting Fellowship on 9 January 2026, announced its 12 fellows in February, ran the training workshop in Manila from 26 to 28 February 2026, and expected the resulting investigations to be published by the end of May 2026. There is no open application, no extended deadline, and — as of 27 July 2026 — no announced second round.

If you landed here hoping to apply, skip to What to apply for instead. If you are researching how this program worked, because you want to be ready if EJN repeats it or because you are building a similar pitch for another funder, the rest of this page documents the 2026 cycle in detail: what it paid, who qualified, what applicants had to submit, and what the training actually covered.

At a Glance

What the 2026 cycle was for

EJN built the fellowship around a specific gap in Philippine coverage: plenty of reporting arrives in the hours after a typhoon, very little arrives months later to ask whether the money meant to prevent the damage was ever spent properly. The call cited the 2025 storms Kalmaegi (Tino) and Fung-wong (Uwan), which affected more than 6.8 million people and left roughly 2.8 million displaced, alongside the flood-control corruption allegations that drew large street protests in November 2025 and the Department of Public Works and Highways’ own admission that hundreds of inspected projects were “ghost” projects.

Four story themes framed the call, and they remain a useful template for anyone pitching disaster-accountability work anywhere:

• Financial accountability — tracing national and local Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Fund allocations from budget line to contractor to finished (or unfinished) project.
• Infrastructure effectiveness — testing whether seawalls, flood control structures and other big-ticket resilience projects performed during actual extreme weather, and whether substandard engineering or procurement fraud explains failures.
• Preparedness and policy gaps — measuring the distance between written climate action plans and interagency coordination mandates and what actually happened when a storm hit.
• Ecosystem collapse — connecting deforestation, illegal mining and the loss of mangroves and coral reefs to worsening landslides and storm surges.

What fellows received

Each of the 12 fellows received a story grant of P118,000. EJN’s budget guidance was unusually explicit, and it is worth noting because the same rules apply across most EJN story-grant calls:

• Budgets had to be itemized on EJN’s own template, with justification for every line, and had to disclose any other donor funding for the same story.
• Reporting costs — travel, accommodation, fixers, translation — were expected to dominate. Proposals that leaned heavily on buying new equipment were not considered; EJN assumed applicants already had access to cameras, drones, lighting and tripods.
• A salary stipend was allowed, particularly for freelancers, capped at 30 percent of the total budget.
• Stories could be produced in English or Filipino, but Filipino-language work required an English translation, with the translation cost built into the budget.
• Security spending was encouraged rather than tolerated: applicants were told to plan for their own physical and digital safety and that of their sources, and to fund it from the grant.

Beyond the money, fellows got the training week and then roughly three months of remote, one-on-one editorial mentorship from senior journalists — Carmela Fonbuena, former director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism; Mara Cepeda, a correspondent for Singapore’s Straits Times; and EJN Philippines Program Manager Imelda Abaño.

Who was selected

EJN announced the cohort on 23 February 2026, drawn from what it described as a highly competitive pool. The 12 fellows and their outlets:

• Almira Coleen I. Mendoza, GMA Integrated News (Manila)
• Annie Fe Genon Perez-Gallardo, ABS-CBN News (Cebu City)
• Divina Morgia Suson, Philippine Daily Inquirer (Cagayan de Oro)
• Flor Chantal C. Eco, Environmental Reporting Collective / Deutsche Welle Asia (Quezon City)
• Gerard Delos Santos Dela Peña, TV5 Network (Mandaluyong City)
• John Sebastian Tan Sitchon, Rappler (Cebu City)
• Ma. Cristina Chi, Philstar.com (Antipolo City)
• Mariejo S. Ramos, VERA Files (Quezon City)
• Mildred V. Galarpe, SunStar Cebu (Cebu City)
• Raymund B. Villanueva, Kodao Productions (Quezon City)
• Rjay Z. Castor, Daily Guardian / Rappler (Iloilo City)
• Xer Jason Diolola Ocampo, MindaNews (Davao City)

The spread is instructive. Only a minority came from Manila-based national desks; Cebu, Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro and Davao are all represented, and community and nonprofit outlets sit alongside the big broadcasters. Applicants from regional and community media were not filling a quota — they were a substantial share of the cohort.

What the workshop covered

The three-day Manila workshop, 26–28 February 2026, was run by Abaño and paired climate science with document work. Sessions included analyzing climate data, reading contracts and audit findings, handling mis- and disinformation, ethics and fairness, and the use of AI in investigative reporting.

Carmela Fonbuena pushed fellows toward the “investigative hook” — the systemic failure behind the news event rather than the event itself. Dr. Mahar Lagmay of Project NOAH demonstrated real-time data feeds and hazard maps for identifying which communities are actually exposed. Aika Rey taught sourcing and visualizing public data, arguing that the point of a chart is to make a statistic accountable rather than decorative. Jaemark Tordecilla, a senior journalist working on AI, made the case that AI belongs in an investigation only when you start from a journalism problem and iterate, not when you start from the tool. Rowena Paraan, head of training at the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, led the safety session and framed protection as collective — cross-publication, peer support, and allies inside institutions. Arianne Olegario, EJN’s Gender Equality and Social Inclusion specialist, covered why extreme weather lands unevenly on marginalized communities.

The cohort also went into the field, visiting Barangay Taliptip in Bulacan with senior reporter Leilani Chavez to see the Manila Bay reclamation site, community displacement, and mangrove loss in one of the most subsidence-prone areas in the country.

Will there be another round?

EJN has not announced one. As of 27 July 2026, the Philippines fellowship does not appear among the open calls on EJN’s opportunities page, and no successor deadline has been published. The original page remains online as a record of the closed call, which is why the link above still works.

That said, this was not a one-off structure. The fellowship sits under EJN’s Sida-funded Asia-Pacific Project, and EJN runs Philippines-relevant calls regularly. If you want to be notified, the practical move is to check earthjournalism.net/opportunities monthly and to create an EJN account now — applications run through a login on EJN’s own site, and having the account already set up removes one obstacle when a call opens with a four-week window.

What to apply for instead

Several EJN calls were open as of late July 2026, including one that explicitly names the Philippines:

• Media Grants to Support Coverage of Countries’ Progress Toward the 30x30 Marine Conservation Target 2026–2027 — for newsrooms and media organizations in coastal countries, with particular focus on Ghana, Mexico and the Philippines. Deadline 10 August 2026.
• Story Grants to Report on Business Responses to Climate Change in Thailand — deadline 2 August 2026.
• Virtual Media Workshop on Forest Governance — for journalists from Ghana, Liberia and Cameroon, plus reporters in forest-risk-commodity consumer markets including China and India. Deadline 13 August 2026.
• Story Grants to Report on Asia’s Endangered Apes and Biodiversity and Nature-based Solutions Story Grants 2026 — both open to journalists across Asia.

Deadlines shift, so confirm each on the EJN opportunities page before you plan around it.

How to be ready if this returns

The requirements EJN set here are stable across its story-grant programs, so preparing against them is not wasted effort even if the Philippines fellowship never repeats.

Line up an editor’s letter early. Every applicant had to submit a signed letter of support from an editor or publisher explicitly committing the outlet to publish the resulting story by a fixed date. This was not a formality — EJN stated that no extensions would be granted on the May 2026 publication deadline. Freelancers were welcome, but only with that letter in hand. Editors often need an internal pitch before signing, so start the conversation weeks before any deadline.

Sort out access and licensing. EJN, its partners and the Wikimedia Foundation receive rights to edit, publish, broadcast and distribute grantee stories. EJN and Sida encourage grantees to release work under one of the six Creative Commons licenses, and outlets with paywalls were asked to make an exception for the funded piece. If your publication’s policy or data-sovereignty concerns make that impossible, EJN wanted to hear about it at application time, not after.

Write a narrow, executable proposal. The judging criteria were relevance, angle, reach, impact, innovative storytelling and a credible plan for timely publication. “Investigate flood control corruption” is not a proposal. “Trace the three DRRM-funded flood control contracts awarded in this municipality between 2023 and 2025, obtain the inspection reports, and show which structures failed during Uwan” is one — it names the documents, the sources and the finish line.

Budget honestly. Two trips, named barangays, real per-diem figures, translation costs, and a security line beat a round number labeled “research expenses.”

Disclose AI use. Applicants were required to be transparent about any generative AI used to revise their proposals, and EJN reserved the right to disqualify anyone who submitted AI-generated content as their own or otherwise acted unethically.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still apply? No. Applications closed 9 January 2026 and EJN stated that late submissions would not be considered. The fellows have been selected, trained and funded, and their reporting period ended in May 2026.

Is the link on this page broken? The official EJN page is live, but earthjournalism.net blocks automated requests, so link checkers may report an error. It loads normally in a browser. The previous link on this page was an expired Auth0 login token that dumped readers on the EJN homepage; it has been replaced with the canonical opportunity page.

Where can I read the fellows’ stories? EJN publishes grantee work on its Stories page and covers program milestones under Project Updates. Individual pieces also ran in the fellows’ home outlets — Rappler, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philstar.com, VERA Files, SunStar Cebu, MindaNews and the rest — and carry the tagline “This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.”

Who do I contact about EJN grants? [email protected]. EJN asks that you not route grant questions through other Internews addresses, because they will not reach the right team.

Was P118,000 the total value? It was the story grant. The workshop, the field visit, and roughly three months of mentorship from Fonbuena, Cepeda and Abaño were provided on top of it.