A friend reports from the frontlines of climate change

Joanna Kakissis was one of the five journalists in the Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism program at CU with me last year. Joanna was born in Athens, Greece, but grew up in Williston, N.D. She's particularly interested in immigrants and their stories (and she's particularly adept at such reporting, too, perhaps because of her finely tuned empathy). For the past few years she's been based in Athens, reporting for the New York Times and other publications. At CU, she focused on the climate justice movement and on climate refugees; people who are being forced out of their homes because of desertification (as in Darfur) or rising seas and mismanaged waterways (as in Bangladesh.) After the Scripps fellowship, she received an International Reporting Project fellowship, and headed to Bangladesh to report on what's happening there. Here's her report.