Josh Landis lived and worked in Antarctica from 1999 to 2001 as an editor at The Antarctic Sun, the only newspaper on the continent at that time. And while he was hardly the only person on the continent, it could often feel like that in a peaceful sort of way.
“Being able to sit on the ice, with penguins walking by and seeing killer whales spyhopping in the water, rising and falling right in front of me, stuck with me forever,” he says. “It gave me a personal appreciation for the vulnerability of these places which at first seems so impervious” to climate change.
After leaving Antarctica, Landis returned to his hometown of New York City where he worked in high-profile jobs for several years, writing for ABC News anchors and eventually becoming a CBS News national correspondent. Though he had reached a pinnacle professionally, his thoughts always drifted back to the Earth’s southernmost continent. Four years ago, he helped found Nexus Media News, a nonprofit science, tech and environmental news service with a focus on climate change and supported by foundations.
Landis’ passion about climate change was among the reasons he was chosen by Microsoft News and the International Center for Journalists for an ICFJ Alumni Reporting Grant with a focus on data journalism, which included receiving data visualization training using Microsoft Power BI.
Landis and his team, in collaboration with the CityLab news organization, chose to investigate how climate change is influencing the U.S. real estate market. They drew upon research from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group, which calculated real estate losses due to persistent flooding from Texas to Maine.
While other news reports covered the data by focusing on where the highest dollar amounts were lost, Landis, his team and First Street incorporated census data for a unique analysis. Using Power BI, they determined which areas lost the most real estate value relative to the average home price in the affected area. After crunching the numbers across thousands of ZIP codes, one of the highest “loss ratio” places was Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.