New York Times Headway initiative turns the lens on underappreciated peatlands

Peatlands may account for only 3% of the earth’s surface, but they store as much as 30% of all the carbon contained in soil. The fate of these wetland areas—and the carbon they’ve diligently stashed away for thousands of years—is therefore closely intertwined with efforts to avert climate catastrophe.

The latest project from The New York Times Headway initiative focuses on these often overlooked and underappreciated environments. Explore the freely accessible Headway stories:

Headway brings together leading journalists to look at the world’s challenges through the lens of progress, aiming to give the public free access to in-depth new reporting on the environment, health, infrastructure, the economy, and social issues that looks beyond the daily churn of news. Over the course of the three-year initiative, a team of journalists from the Times will continue to explore big challenges at the national and global scale from the perspective of how we can make progress toward resolving them. All of Headway’s stories will be freely accessible without a subscription.

Read the stories included last Headway project, which looked back at past predictions of the future.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) proudly supports the Headway as part of an effort to help maintain independent and accessible journalism as a pillar of democratic society, especially efforts like Headway that are able to step back and take a long view to offer useful insights. The Foundation also supports a “bootcamp” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies where journalism students produce a long-form investigative reporting project on a timely international topic. Another such organization is iMEdD (the incubator for Media Education and Development), a journalism nonprofit launched in 2018 with exclusive support from SNF that produces interactive data-driven projects, in addition to incubating new journalistic projects and organizations and much more.

Here’s how The New York Times describes philanthropic involvement in Headway: “The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway's public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.”