Zahra Hirji

Zahra Hirji reports on how climate change, environmental policy and industry decisions play out in everyday life, with a focus on concrete impacts and practical responses. She is a climate reporter at Bloomberg News, working on the climate and environment beat with an emphasis on climate solutions coverage for Bloomberg Green. Her stories link science, regulation and on-the-ground experience, explaining what shifting policies, technologies and disasters mean for health, infrastructure and household choices.

Extreme heat, climate disasters and public health

Hirji covers extreme heat as a public-health crisis, examining how rising temperatures translate into illness and mortality and what local authorities are doing to blunt those harms. Her reporting on Arizona’s recent summers and trends in heat-linked deaths looks at how a region facing brutal heat waves is testing new approaches to keep residents alive, and how data on fatalities reflects those efforts. She places heat in the wider context of compounding climate disasters, including work on how multiple hazards - from storms to wildfires to heat - are combining to deliver more severe impacts for communities and systems.

Across this coverage, she treats climate change not as an abstract threat but as a set of pressures on health services, housing, outdoor work and basic safety, translating technical research into clear, human-centred narratives.

Climate policy, power plants and regulation

A significant strand of Hirji’s beat follows the battle over power-plant emissions and broader climate regulation.

She has reported on efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit greenhouse gases from coal- and gas-fired power plants, as well as moves to rescind or weaken those rules under changing administrations. In these stories, she tracks how regulatory decisions interact with the energy sector, explaining what rollbacks or new standards mean for utilities, investors and communities living near plants.

Her work includes on-air explainers breaking down complex policy shifts, making clear which tools regulators are using, how industry is responding and where legal or political fights could alter the trajectory of US climate action. She brings the same approach to other climate and energy rules, connecting federal decisions on greenhouse gas controls to broader debates over environmental protection and economic priorities.

Chemicals, pollution and consumer products

Hirji’s coverage extends to pollution and toxic chemicals, particularly where they intersect with consumer goods and everyday choices.

She has co-written features on efforts to remove PFAS “forever chemicals” from raincoats, tracing how apparel companies, regulators and scientists are racing to redesign waterproof gear without substances linked to health risks. That reporting explores the tension between performance standards, corporate branding and the emerging evidence on long-lived chemicals, and shows how supply-chain decisions ripple out to consumers and workers. More broadly, she uses these stories to illustrate how climate and environmental concerns reach into products people buy, the materials industries rely on and the rules governments are considering to curb pollution.

Climate solutions and energy industry accountability

Within Bloomberg Green’s expansion, Hirji works as a climate solutions reporter, contributing service-oriented coverage that looks at what governments, companies and households are actually doing to cut emissions and adapt to a warming world.

Her beat includes stories on technologies, financing mechanisms and local programs that promise cleaner energy or greater resilience, written in a way that helps readers understand costs, benefits and trade-offs rather than just slogans. This focus builds on earlier work in science and climate reporting, where she covered natural gas drilling, fossil fuel divestment, renewable energy policy and climate science, along with investigations into worker safety, discrimination in the oil and gas industry and the dangers of air pollution from fracking. Across both her current and past coverage, she treats the energy industry as a central driver of climate risk and a necessary part of any solution, using data, documents and field reporting to scrutinize promises and impacts while keeping affected workers and communities in view.

Hirji’s body of work is unified by close attention to how climate change and environmental decisions land on real people - from residents facing lethal heat to workers in fossil fuel fields and consumers navigating new claims about green products. She combines explanatory reporting, feature writing and broadcast segments, consistently grounding big-picture climate debates in specific policies, places and lived experience. For communications teams, her interests sit at the intersection of climate science, regulation, energy systems and practical solutions, and she engages most deeply with stories that show clear, documented consequences or measurable progress on those fronts.