As 2023 draws to a close, so, too, does the first full year of Mongabay’s Conservation Reporting Fellowships. Launched at a time of unprecedented planetary upheaval, the program aims to build a new generation of environmental reporters from the world’s biodiversity hotspots. This is the future of reporting on Earth as we know it now — and Earth as it will be in years to come. As a planet, we broke records left and right this year, from heat waves to catastrophic storms, floods and fires — as well as fossil fuel production — all of which push us closer to the brink of the nine “planetary boundaries” that determine Earth’s suitability for our presence here. It is paramount that journalists from the most vulnerable, affected regions of the world are equipped to report these phenomena as they happen. To that end, in 2022, Mongabay established two Y. Eva Tan Fellowship programs, in English and Spanish, to prepare journalists from low- and middle-income tropical countries with the tools and opportunities they need to tackle this job. Each fellowship comprises a cohort of three journalists in each language who work with Mongabay for six months. Ultimately, we hope all fellows will go on to become regular contributors. This year, the first three cohorts overlapped, representing six countries in the English-language program: Kenya, the Philippines, Brazil, Nigeria, Suriname and India. As fellowship editor of the English-language program, 2023 presented one of my biggest learning curves ever. This fellowship is framed as a…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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