Natalie Whiting
Natalie Whiting reports on environmental shocks and social upheaval across Asia and beyond for the ABC, using on-the-ground audio and television storytelling to anchor complex events in everyday lives. Her environment beat sits within a wider foreign reporting role, where earthquakes, conflict, governance and cultural change are treated as lived conditions rather than abstract issues. She works as a video journalist and multiplatform reporter, regularly filing for current affairs programs, long-form television and radio news.
Foreign correspondence and multiplatform reporting
Whiting is a video journalist and multiplatform reporter with the ABC, working across news and current affairs teams and taking stories from field reporting through to finished packages. She has held a dedicated correspondent role covering Papua New Guinea, giving her extended experience in reporting from complex environments and politically sensitive settings. Her career includes several journalism awards and recognition as a finalist in a major young journalist prize, which underpins a track record of original reporting rather than desk-based commentary.
That background shows in her present work, where she moves between daily news, feature audio and television formats while maintaining a consistent focus on people and place.
Earthquakes and environmental stress in Japan
A defining thread in Whiting’s recent coverage is large-scale natural disaster, especially earthquakes in Japan and their immediate environmental stresses. In a piece on heat and aftershocks following a major Japanese earthquake, she reports from the affected area, focusing on the combined pressures of high temperatures, ongoing tremors and the strain on survivors and rescue crews.
Companion coverage on rescue efforts after the same quake tracks search operations and conditions on the ground, with Whiting filing from near Kumamoto City as authorities look for survivors and manage damaged infrastructure. Across these reports, she links seismic events to concrete issues such as safety, shelter and public services, framing the disaster as an environmental crisis playing out in homes, streets and workplaces.
Conflict, governance and human impact
Whiting’s environment beat extends into conflict and governance stories where the terrain is war zones, detention centres and contested territories.
Her reporting on North Korea providing additional troops to Russia situates a military decision within a broader landscape of regional security and the human toll in Ukraine. In coverage of Israel marking the October 7 anniversary, she reports from Jerusalem, drawing out the atmosphere on the ground and the way commemoration, security measures and ongoing conflict shape daily life. An exclusive report on Israel’s requirement for war zone DNA tests follows one family divided between different locations, using their experience to show how policy decisions intersect with grief, identity and movement across borders.
Earlier work from Papua New Guinea examines questions over a private company’s contract on Manus Island, connecting corporate arrangements and government oversight to conditions in a remote detention setting. Taken together, these stories show a reporter who treats conflict and policy as environments people inhabit, rather than as distant geopolitical abstractions.
Culture, housing and changing communities
Whiting often covers cultural and housing stories where the physical and social environment of communities is in flux. For Foreign Correspondent, she travels to Sicilian towns where abandoned houses are being sold for one euro, examining what it really takes to renovate and live in these properties and what that means for depopulated communities. In recent work on the geisha of Tokyo, she takes audiences inside a traditionally closed world, documenting how modern economic and cultural pressures are reshaping geisha life and the neighbourhoods where they work. Earlier domestic reporting has focused on financial management in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands and on outcomes in child protection cases, connecting institutional decisions to the welfare of communities and the services they rely on. Across these pieces, her coverage highlights how policy, tradition and economic change alter the spaces people occupy, whether an ancient entertainment district, a remote Indigenous region or a crumbling Italian town.
Whiting’s body of work is distinguished by its combination of foreign correspondence and environmental framing: she approaches earthquakes, wars, contracts and cultural shifts as conditions seen and felt by the people living through them. Her reporting is built around field presence, clear narrative structure and attention to specific places, making her particularly suited to stories that sit at the intersection of environment, governance and human experience.
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.