Neel Dhanesha
Neel Dhanesha is a science and climate journalist and staff writer at Nieman Journalism Lab whose reporting follows how climate, science, and the information systems around them shape everyday life. He treats environment and climate change as interconnected with law, platforms, and media formats, moving between biodiversity stories, court cases, and the infrastructure of news. His work spans text and audio, and he is drawn to stories that show how people live with a changing world rather than only tracking emissions or policy.
Climate connects to every part of life
Dhanesha has spent most of his career covering climate change and its ripple effects across society, first as a climate change reporter at Vox and then as a founding staff writer at the climate journalism startup Heatmap. At Heatmap he worked from the premise that climate connects to every part of life, writing about how the energy transition works in practice and how readers can take part in that change. His reporting and interviews have explored the landmark youth-led climate case Held v.
Montana, treating it as both a legal test and a window into how the next generation is pushing institutions to confront environmental harm. He has also taken on species-level stories, including coverage of the lesser prairie chicken’s precarious status and why the fate of a single dancing bird illustrates the broader tension between conservation, industry, and regional identity.
In his environment work for Vox he has reported on efforts to discover new species and used that search to explain biodiversity loss and the role of media in making intangible scientific frontiers tangible to audiences.
The ways we live with a changing world
Dhanesha’s climate reporting is distinguished by attention to lived experience and adaptation rather than only to abstract projections. He has traced how coastal erosion reshapes communities, using Louisiana as an early reporting focus and treating the landscape itself as evidence of what climate change looks like on the ground.
Across his beat he returns to the question of how people organize their lives around environmental shifts, whether through legal strategies like Held v.
Montana, local fights over species protection, or the day-to-day choices involved in the energy transition. He writes clearly about systems but grounds them in specific places, species, and decisions, which makes his climate coverage useful for stories that sit at the intersection of law, infrastructure, and ecology rather than in a narrow environmental silo.
Science, climate, and audio storytelling
Alongside his text reporting, Dhanesha has a substantial audio background that informs his approach to storytelling. He has worked as an assistant producer at Radiolab, helping to make The Other Latif, a series about one detainee’s journey to Guantanamo Bay that combines investigative reporting with narrative structure. He has produced episodes of Firebug, a podcast that looks at arson and its cultural echoes, and contributed to ESPN’s 30 for 30 series Heavy Medals, which examines abuse and power in elite gymnastics. At Nieman Lab he has written about audio as an industry and creative form, including a feature on the independent audio magazine Signal Hill that looks at how donor funding, subscriptions, and editorial ambition can sustain experimental audio journalism.
He has also examined how true crime podcasts have reshaped public radio, using the genre’s evolution as a lens on how audio executives think about investigative work and audience demand. Taken together, this portfolio shows a journalist who is comfortable moving between climate, science, crime, and politics in audio, and who pays close attention to the ethics and business structures behind the shows.
Platforms, AI, and the integrity of information
More recently, Dhanesha’s work at Nieman Lab has focused on platforms, artificial intelligence, and the reliability of online information.
He has reported on Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity promoting debunked race science in search results, explaining how flawed ranking and guardrails can surface discredited content and what that means for communities targeted by pseudoscience. In another piece he looks at Hoodline’s AI-generated local news and argues that the byline is central to transparency when automation enters community reporting, scrutinizing how the publication signals (or obscures) the role of machines in its stories.
He has covered X’s Community Notes program by tracing how professional fact-checkers have become some of its top sources, raising questions about the relationship between volunteer annotation systems and formal verification work. He has also examined an AI-generated fictional podcast released soon after deadly Hezbollah pager explosions, using that case to explore the ethical boundaries of automated storytelling around real-world violence. Across these pieces, his distinguishing trait is a focus on how technical systems and editorial choices interact, and how they change the conditions under which climate, science, and public-interest reporting is produced and received.
Before joining Nieman Lab, Dhanesha built a cross-format portfolio that ties together climate journalism and audio production. He has worked as a fellow at Audubon magazine, reported on science and climate for Vox, and freelanced across text and audio, alongside his role in helping launch Heatmap. In interviews about his work he has described himself as a writer and podcast producer especially focused on climate change and the ways we live with and adapt to the world changing around us.
His current reporting keeps that climate perspective but extends it to the infrastructure of information itself, making him a useful contact for stories that sit where environment, science, platforms, and audio intersect.
4 more environment journalists.
Alan Halaly
Alan Halaly is a water reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal who treats the Colorado River as a working system, not a backdrop, making its governance, infrastructure and risks central to his beat. He covers how policy decisions and infrastructure projects shape the region’s water future, linking high-level choices on the Colorado River, dams, mining and data centers to everyday consequences under mounting heat and growth pressures. He reports deeply on new laws, lawsuits and regulatory shifts, focusing on on-the-ground impacts. His coverage spans Colorado River cuts, Hoover Dam operations, extreme weather, heat and parks, septic system rules, workplace and public health risks, lithium and gold mines, protected landscapes, data centers, AI infrastructure and public funding. Previously he reported for metropolitan dailies, digital outlets and public media, including the Miami Herald, WUFT, The Daily Beast and Miami New Times, with work recognized by Hearst, ONA and the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Alejandra Borunda
Alejandra Borunda reports on how climate change affects human health for NPR. Her work treats global warming as a direct cause of physical and mental health risks. She covers extreme heat, including undercounted deaths, lost sleep and local efforts to track heat-related fatalities. She also reports on wildfire smoke, hurricanes, disease spread such as dengue fever, trauma, stress and unequal health impacts. Her stories examine how communities protect themselves and recover, as well as practical solutions involving climate-resilient crops, agriculture and diet. Before NPR, she wrote about climate science and environmental issues for National Geographic, including glacier retreat, shade and heat inequity, and shrinking ice-fishing seasons. A former climate scientist, she combines field reporting with scientific data to connect atmospheric research to everyday risks, choices and people’s lived experiences.
Alex Lubben
Alex Lubben is an environment reporter at The Times-Picayune/The Advocate who connects climate risk to policy, industry and community change. He covers Gulf warming, flood protection, coastal restoration, wetlands litigation, industrial projects such as SpaceX’s possible expansion, invasive species and local ecosystems. His reporting tracks how law, politics and corporate decisions shape levees, drainage, marshes and long-term resilience. He also examines climate relocation, housing and labor, showing how hurricanes, floods and wildfires displace vulnerable communities and expose gaps in government systems. He works on a small environment team and brings an investigative background to document work, data analysis, legal and policy research, and field reporting. His work has appeared in VICE News, The Center for Public Integrity, The Nation, Jewish Currents and NBC News.
Alex Wigglesworth
Alex Wigglesworth reports on how climate, land use and public policy shape California communities. She covers the Inland Empire and Mojave Desert for the Los Angeles Times and is part of its environment team. Her beat includes wildfires, megadrought, extreme weather, desert development, conservation, wildlife, industrial hazards, aging infrastructure and regulatory enforcement. She has covered Western Joshua trees, desert tortoises, beaver-led restoration, toxic lead pipes, air-quality concerns after industrial fires and the effects of nuclear war on food systems. Earlier, she was a general assignment reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com. She combines breaking news with detailed reporting grounded in scientific studies, modeling and expert interviews. Her work connects fires, drought and other hazards to climate change, while examining how agencies, companies and land-use decisions affect people and ecosystems.