Mark Saunokonoko
Mark Saunokonoko is an environment reporter at the Guardian who focuses on how climate change and extreme weather collide with infrastructure, trade and everyday life. He works on the Guardian’s international desk, bringing long experience in digital news reporting into his climate coverage. His recent work centres on how heat, drought and other climate‑driven shocks force governments and industries to change the way they operate. He tends to anchor stories in concrete decisions and disruptions, rather than in abstract climate science.
Extreme heat and public safety
Saunokonoko’s coverage of South Korea recording its highest ever temperature shows his focus on immediate public consequences of climate extremes. In that piece he reports on official instructions to stop all outdoor activities as temperatures reach new records, foregrounding the warnings issued to residents and workers rather than only the meteorological data. He treats extreme heat as a public safety and governance story, showing how authorities respond when conditions move beyond past experience.
Drought, El Niño and global chokepoints
His reporting on drought linked to El Niño and the Panama canal highlights another strand of his work: climate pressure on critical trade routes. In that story he covers cuts to canal traffic driven by prolonged dry conditions, tying environmental change directly to shipping flows and economic risk. The piece sits at the intersection of environment and international affairs, treating the canal as a global chokepoint where local rainfall patterns have repercussions for supply chains far beyond the region.
Saunokonoko’s approach in this type of coverage is to show how climate variability forces operational decisions at major infrastructure hubs, making the stakes clear for readers who follow trade and logistics.
Infrastructure, data and everyday disruption
Earlier work in a major digital newsroom has given Saunokonoko a habit of grounding stories in specific locations, data sets and lived disruption. At Nine he wrote about traffic congestion in Sydney and Melbourne, using TomTom data to identify the top five most congested roads and explain how they trap drivers in daily delays. That piece combines ranking, mapping and a clear narrative about inconvenience, signalling a preference for tangible measures of impact rather than general observations.
The same instinct carries into his environment coverage, where he is drawn to how climate and weather re‑shape transport routes, work patterns and the reliability of vital systems.
From general news and crime to climate reporting
Saunokonoko’s path into environment reporting runs through general news and audio storytelling.
He has worked as a senior reporter in a large digital news operation, filing on a wide range of national and international stories. Alongside his newsroom work, he has developed a prominent true‑crime podcast, built around a high‑profile case and structured as a long‑form investigation. That background in narrative audio and crime reporting reinforces his attention to detail, timeline and character, which he now applies to climate‑linked stories where decisions by officials and operators become central to the plot.
In his Guardian role he brings together this investigative and explanatory experience, using it to tell environment stories that are rooted in specific events, institutional choices and measurable consequences.
4 more environment journalists.
Adelaide Lang
Adelaide Lang combines climate reporting with courtroom and Indigenous-focused journalism. She reports for The Daily Telegraph, with work also appearing in The Canberra Times, and contributes guest pieces to National Indigenous Times. Her environment coverage focuses on climate-threatened islands, community resilience and how policy decisions affect people facing direct environmental risks. She follows local campaigns, adaptation efforts and political pressure while keeping the human effects clear. Lang also covers court proceedings involving public officials, including the trial of State MP Gareth Ward over historical sexual and indecent assault charges. Her reporting examines how allegations are tested in court and how the justice system handles accusations against people in power. With more than five years in digital media and courtroom reporting, she writes clear, factual accounts of events, legal processes and their consequences.
Ashleigh McMillan
Ashleigh McMillan is a breaking news reporter at The Age. She stands out for covering the environment through public events, infrastructure and everyday city life. Her reporting tracks how protests, policy decisions and sudden incidents change routines, public safety and the spaces people move through. She covers fast-moving stories across Victoria, with a focus on community tension, access and the lived effects of official decisions. Her work includes protests and public demonstrations, crime and courts, transport and ticketing changes, traffic experiments, weather, and environmental conditions in the city. She reports on what people see and feel on the ground, with attention to victims, commuters, residents and the practical consequences of legal and infrastructure decisions.
Bareket Falk
Bareket Falk uses environmental stories to show how growing bodies handle physical stress, especially heat, during exercise. She is a pediatric exercise physiologist and kinesiology professor whose work focuses on how children, adolescents and adults respond to activity across growth and development. She writes evidence-led explainers for The Conversation that test assumptions about children’s vulnerability and turn decades of exercise science into clear, practical guidance. Her core piece looks at how children and adults cope with extreme heat, walking through basic thermoregulation and challenging the idea that children are automatically more fragile. Her journalism draws directly on research into blood flow, sweating, body size and growth, keeping technical detail tight and translating findings into concrete behaviours such as pacing activity, seeking shade and hydration. She is interested in how physical activity interacts with maturation, body composition and recovery, and uses data to check myths about kids’ risk.
Bec Lorrimer
Bec Lorrimer is a visual journalist and picture editor who tells environment stories through photography and careful image selection at the Guardian. She works at the intersection of climate coverage and visual editing, using picture-led formats to show how global heating and other environmental pressures play out in everyday life. Her environment beat centres on picture galleries that track the lived experience of climate extremes, including record high temperatures in South Korea, with in pictures sequences that foreground the scale of global heating over text-led analysis. She also contributes to monthly roundups of the strongest photos and human-centred features such as a nursing home story, focusing on people and places under pressure. As a global visual editor and assistant picture editor on international fronts, she selects images across environment, politics, culture and general news, drawing on her background as a photographer, video director and photo producer.