Hannah Ritchie
Hannah Ritchie uses long-run data to explain how environmental change interacts with global development, focusing on energy, agriculture, land use, pollution, and food supply. She is Deputy Editor and Science Outreach Lead at Our World in Data, where she has worked since 2017 in research and editorial roles. Her work centers on quantifying environmental pressures and clarifying which solutions make the biggest difference, then communicating that evidence clearly to a broad audience. She also applies the same data-led approach to wider questions in global development, from mortality patterns to technological change and political representation.
Energy and climate change
Ritchie’s energy and climate work focuses on what it takes, in numbers, to cut emissions while expanding access to energy.
She writes regularly on climate solutions, covering technologies such as renewable power, nuclear energy, electric vehicles, heat pumps, carbon capture, and geoengineering, and compares their potential impact using global data. Her articles and books frame climate change as a solvable problem, breaking it down into specific levers and showing how changes in the energy system translate into emissions reductions over time.
She also examines emerging energy demands, such as the share of electricity used for data centers in the United States compared with the global average, to show how digital infrastructure fits into the broader energy and climate picture. Across this beat, her distinguishing trait is an emphasis on clear, quantitative answers to highly practical questions about how to decarbonize while sustaining development.
Food, land use, and biodiversity
Food systems and land use are a core part of Ritchie’s environment work, where she tracks how agriculture reshapes landscapes, drives emissions, and affects biodiversity. She co-authored a comprehensive land use topic page that follows global land use over the long term and disaggregates cropland, pasture, forests, and other categories to show how human use of land has changed. Her coverage of deforestation includes work showing that beef production has been the largest driver of deforestation this century, quantifying how different commodities contribute to forest loss.
She extends this lens to the oceans, writing about the state of global fish stocks and highlighting that just over one-third of the world’s assessed stocks are overexploited, tying depletion back to food security and ecosystem health. Ritchie often connects these environmental pressures to the needs of a growing population, examining how to feed the world while limiting land expansion and habitat loss.
The through-line in this strand of her work is a detailed accounting of how food production and land decisions translate into measurable environmental change.
Environment, health, and human risks
Ritchie frequently links environmental issues to health and mortality, bringing cause-of-death data into conversations that are usually framed around anecdote.
She co-authors work on causes of death that asks what people die from in different countries, how registration systems work, and how vaccines, such as the rotavirus vaccine, prevent children dying from diarrhea. Her articles include analyses of how many children die each year and what they die from, the human cost of unsafe abortions, and the world’s deadliest animals, using these topics to show the scale and preventability of different risks. She has written on deaths from air pollution and on a century of global deaths from disasters, contrasting media coverage with the underlying data to reveal where public attention diverges from actual risk.
This strand of her work is characterized by a willingness to quantify sensitive topics and to test intuitive narratives against long-run statistics on health, disasters, and environmental hazards.
Data-led stories across global development
Although her primary focus is the environment, Ritchie also writes data-driven articles on wider development questions, maintaining the same empirical style. Recent work includes an examination of how current immigration to the United States compares with historical levels, and an analysis of countries where women outnumber men in parliament, using these topics to show how social and political trends can be read through consistent datasets.
She has contributed to work on the spread and impact of the internet, framing technological change within broader patterns of development. Beyond the main outlet, she writes for other publications on agriculture, energy, and the environment, reinforcing her position at the intersection of environmental change, technology, and global development. She also maintains a newsletter where she answers common questions about sustainability and climate solutions, bringing the same chart-heavy, explanatory style to a broader audience.
Across this wider portfolio, her distinguishing feature is the use of clear data stories to challenge pessimism and clarify where the world is making progress and where large gaps remain.
4 more environment journalists.
Abby Wallace
Abby Wallace covers where energy, climate and politics meet, with a focus on how net zero, power markets and extreme weather affect people and institutions. She is an energy and climate reporter at POLITICO, covering U.K. energy policy, climate targets and the transition from fossil fuels. Her subjects include government and opposition debates over net zero, decarbonization, support schemes, infrastructure, public spending and climate adaptation. She also reports on energy companies, household bills, labor standards, supply chains and corporate accountability. Her work connects technical policy choices to jobs, competitiveness, public services and voter sentiment. She uses polling, expert voices and political analysis to examine public attitudes and government response to extreme weather. Before POLITICO, she worked on the companies desk at the Financial Times and the business news desk at Insider. She has also freelanced on politics, business and climate.
Adam Fulton
Adam Fulton is a digital news producer focused on fast-moving global stories where environment, conflict and politics meet. He works on the Guardian’s Australian operation, using rolling live blogs to cover geopolitical crises, climate-linked disasters and wars with clear structure and context. His Middle East coverage, including the Gaza peace plan, tracks tension between political messaging and on-the-ground realities, tying leaders’ statements to military movements, diplomatic reactions and humanitarian reports. His disaster reporting, such as on Nepal–Tibet floods, links rising tolls and missing people to infrastructure damage, rescue strain and cascading environmental threats. His Ukraine war blogs treat resource scarcity, especially water and energy, as strategic factors and track how infrastructure damage shapes the conflict. A former entertainment and arts reporter and senior editor at major Australian newspapers, he applies careful pacing and narrative arcs to collaborative, time-stamped live coverage.
Alec Luhn
Alec Luhn is an environment reporter whose work follows climate change at its extremes, frontiers and human consequences, often reporting directly from places where warming, instability and displacement intersect. He covers climate, conflict and migration, showing how abstract climate trends turn into risks for communities, infrastructure, health and preparedness. He reports for New Scientist on climate breakdown, extreme events, El Niño, limits of models, melting glaciers, warming seas and adaptation to heat, mixing scientific explanation with lived experience. A defining strand of his work is reporting from remote icy and mountainous regions on Arctic sea ice loss, permafrost, polar bears, pollution and fragile ecosystems. He has a long record on conflict and security, including the Skripal poisoning case. His reporting appears in New Scientist and major international outlets, with work across print, digital, audio and television and recognition from climate and journalism awards.
Amy Lyall
Amy Lyall is a regular contributor to The Connexion, and her work stands out for turning French rules, services and the built environment into clear, usable advice for everyday readers. She covers housing, energy use, resident obligations and the practical steps behind things like getting air-conditioning approved for flats. Her beat also includes national and local schemes, insurance and legal conditions for lending a car, mobile network coverage, mosquito-borne diseases, water filters, fruit harvests and emergency drones with defibrillators. She writes news, practical guides and magazine-style features, using plain language to explain technical topics and official systems. She also writes explainers on French words and phrases and occasional culture pieces on unusual sites such as Maison Picassiette.