The forest in northern Gabon didn’t look like a battleground. It was a patchwork of hunting trails and village paths, home to fruit trees and ancestral graves. When a logging concession encroached and the community of Massaha protested, their pleas traveled poorly through official channels. Then the story was reported, documented and read by people in a position to act. The environment minister took notice, revoked the company’s permit, and the government moved to protect the forest at the community’s request. The victory wasn’t journalism’s alone. It belonged to village leaders who organized, the officials who acted, and the laws that allowed for course correction. Yet none of it would have happened, or not as quickly, had the facts not been gathered, verified and made public. This is how journalism drives impact at its best. It doesn’t draft statutes, deploy police or plant trees. It supplies the oxygen those actions require: credible information, in time, in public. Impact begins with agenda setting. Most decisions are made in the shadows of omission, not malice. Issues remain invisible because they’re technical, remote or inconvenient. Reporting shifts the spotlight. Consider the opaque 100-year carbon-credit deal quietly advanced in Sabah, Malaysia. Coverage exposed the terms, the intermediaries and the absence of meaningful consultation with Indigenous landholders. Once the arrangement was on the record, it was scrutinized in the courts and in the press, where it stalled, and then unraveled. The result owed much to civil society and the legal process. It also owed…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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