Alex Harris and Susan Merriam from The Miami Herald have won the 2025 Thomas L. Stokes Award for Best Energy and Environment Writing from the National Press Foundation.
Harris and Merriam’s three-part investigative series for The Miami Herald reveals how climate change and street flooding are reshaping life—and property values—in South Florida, often in ways the public can’t easily see. It shows that despite rising seas and repeated flooding, home prices remain strong in a “climate denial bubble,” with risks largely ignored or hidden in sales data. The reporting also uncovers a major gap in oversight: no single government agency tracks street flooding, and the worst impacts often fall outside official FEMA flood zones.
“By mapping a decade of flooding and combining data with on-the-ground reporting, the series gives residents clear, concrete insight into a growing threat that officials have failed to fully explain or monitor,” said the judges. “The series exemplifies strong, creative, data-driven local reporting designed for impact. It is a deeply human story featuring revelatory data analysis on the impact to property outside FEMA’s flood maps.”
The judging panel also awarded a strong honorable mention to Will Fitzgibbon of The Examination and Peter S. Goodman and Samuel Granados of The New York Times, for their investigation into lead poisoning resulting from battery recycling. U.S. environmental regulations and market pressures have led to an explosion of offshore battery recycling, which has in turn resulted in the widespread, unseen poisoning of women, infants, children, and others in Nigeria, Tanzania and Ghana. The Examination and the Times tracked a complex supply chain and paid to test lead levels in the blood of people near the worst of the plants.
The judges praised this “story of international systemic failure; a heartbreaking story of the unintended, oft-overlooked economic and environmental consequences of ‘someone else’s problem.’” The panel praised its evocative storytelling, deep and humane reporting, strong visuals, and impact.
The Stokes Award was established in the spring of 1959 to honor the late Thomas L. Stokes, a columnist on national affairs who had a personal interest in energy, natural resources and the environment. It is given annually for the best reporting in those subject areas. Each year it is given for work completed in the previous calendar year.
