Arena journalism

Arena’s groundbreaking data investigation, Green to Grey, wins Sigma Award

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The Sigma Award logo, an illustration of several pencils pointing at a cloudy sky scene, with the text "winners announced" overlaid.

We’re excited to announce that the Green to Grey investigation is a Sigma Award Winner for 2026! Our groundbreaking data journalism investigation, a collaboration between Arena and 11 news teams across Europe, revealed the scale of nature and cropland loss across the continent over a six year period. It was the first investigation of its kind, … Read more

‘Green to Grey’ investigation read by more than 3 million

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The Green to Grey logo on a background grid of satellite images of highly built-up 'grey' areas. The website URL greentogrey.eu and the hashtag are beneath the main logo. At the bottom is the Arena logo, stating this is a collaborative project of Arena for Journalism in Europe, and at the very bottom is a credit to Pleides, CNES and Airbus for the background images.

On October 1, the Green to Grey project went live. In the first investigation of its kind, 41 journalists and scientists from 11 countries worked together for 10 months to reveal the scale of Europe’s nature and cropland loss. We found that every year, Europe loses 1,500 km² to construction. Between 2018 and 2023, we … Read more

‘First of its kind’: Behind the scenes of Green to Grey’s groundbreaking data investigation

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A collage of the green to grey logo on the left, with a colour coded map of Europe on the right.

We’ve described our latest cross-border collaborative journalism project, Green to Grey, as an investigation that is the ‘first of its kind’. That’s a big claim – so, let us explain what we mean. When we launched the project, we outlined the story of how it came about: inspired by the Norwegian broadcaster NRK’s original investigation … Read more