Covering Climate Now named ProPublica a finalist for its first journalism award, which will be given out annually in recognition of “exemplary coverage of the defining story of our time.”

“The Great Climate Migration,” a project by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center, was named a finalist in the special coverage, series or issue category. ProPublica environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten, alongside Al Shaw, Meridith Kohut, Lucas Waldron and photographer Sergey Ponomarev, showed how climate refugees might move across international borders as climate change makes certain areas unlivable.

In a series of stories that followed, Lustgarten examined the warming of the planet and how climate change is beginning to spur a mass migration of Americans, shifting perhaps millions of people and changing the way the country looks and works. Using a first-of-its-kind mathematical model to forecast the effects of climate change on the movements of communities, the stories explored the future of a world shaped by climate-driven migration and shared the experiences of people for whom this displacement has already begun.

“Breathtaking in its ambition and scope,” judges wrote, “this series pulled together familiar threads about the impact of climate change on migration with a renewed sense of urgency, on a truly global canvas. Painstaking data journalism combined with absorbing storytelling explained what we are seeing today, and what the world might look like tomorrow, with visuals that were impossible to ignore.”

Covering Climate Now and Columbia Journalism Review created the awards to “celebrate journalism that provides a model for journalists everywhere as newsrooms increase their coverage of the climate crisis.”

Read the full list of finalists.