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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced Thursday that “Black Snow: Big Sugar’s Burning Problem,” a Local Reporting Network project by The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica, won an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award in the in-depth category.
The investigation — by Lulu Ramadan, who was a Post reporter at the time, along with ProPublica’s Ash Ngu, Maya Miller and Nadia Sussman — showed how Florida regulators allow the sugar industry to burn crops at the expense of communities of color in the state’s heartland, despite research showing the harms and complaints from residents.
Over 18 months, the team interviewed dozens of people living amid the cane fields and obtained hundreds of public records from environmental and public health agencies. The team also did its own air monitoring, consulting with six experts in air quality and public health from universities across the country and installing sensors at homes in one of the state’s most underserved communities.
The investigation found that state regulators were relying on data from a single monitor that was unfit to enforce federal clean-air standards. It was only after the team started asking questions that Florida officials replaced the unfit monitor, and leading members of Congress called for the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate air monitoring in Florida and change national pollution standards. The Palm Beach County Department of Health upgraded the air-monitoring equipment, which will allow it to be used to enforce federal pollution standards, and officials said they were in talks with the EPA to expand air monitoring in the state.
Throughout the reporting process, Florida’s largest sugar producers challenged the news organizations’ approach and methodology. They maintained that burning was safe and could not be stopped without significant economic impact. But the reporting team learned that other countries had found ways to harvest their crops without those burns. Sussman traveled to Brazil, the world’s largest sugar producer, where the state of São Paulo had largely phased out burning years ago after residents there voiced concerns similar to those of Floridians today.
She made a short documentary explaining how the industry switched to another harvesting method, one that has paid off for companies in terms of profit and for the public in terms of health. Notably, Brazilian officials in government and industry told ProPublica that their solutions could also work in Florida.
Richard Harris, awards judge and longtime science reporter for NPR, said the reporting team “took extraordinary steps to explore an important health hazard that primarily harms disadvantaged people. They worked closely with the community, installed air monitoring equipment and analyzed data, all of which they used to tell a compelling story.”
See a list of all 2022 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award winners.
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