Environmental journalists at last year’s COP30 climate meeting in Belém, Brazil, interview the French ecology and biodiversity minister Monique Barbut. Credit: Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty
In June 2025, a year-long investigation exposed an illegal trade smuggling timber from protected areas in the Congolese rainforest into neighbouring Burundi.
Award-winning Burundian journalist Arthur Bizimana and his collaborator Martin Leku, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, risked their safety by travelling deep into the rainforest — the world’s second-largest — to gather material for their exclusive story on the impact on this crucial carbon sink.
Their assignment was financially supported by InfoNile, a journalism network focusing on cross-border investigations in the Nile Basin, and Global Forest Watch, a data platform funded by the United Nations Environment Programme and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It’s the kind of in-depth investigative work that far exceeds the reporting budgets of most research news publications, such as Nature or Science — and that attracts little attention from large media organizations and newspapers. Often, such reporting is made possible only because of grants given to journalists by private philanthropies or government donors.
But with these grants drying up as philanthropic donors tighten their purse strings in the wake of US-led cuts to international development and health budgets, the ability of journalists such as Bizimana and Leku to hold power to account is diminishing.
Marius Dragomir, a Romanian journalist and director of the Media and Journalism Research Center in Tallinn, a think tank and global research hub he founded in 2022, describes the funding threats to science journalism as “a disaster”. He adds: “If you look at the geopolitical situation today, I think science is critical.” There is a need for balanced reporting of science-related topics, but “a lot of that coverage is disappearing” at the exact moment it’s needed, he explains.
Grant-supported work is an important part of the science-journalism ecosystem. Freelance science journalists can apply for reporting grants from organizations such as InfoNile, the Pulitzer Center in Washington DC and the European Journalism Centre in Maastricht, the Netherlands. News organizations also apply for grants to beef up their newsrooms, or to fund their operations entirely. In the United States, for example, around one-quarter of mainstream news outlets operate on a non-profit basis, according to a 2021 study conducted by the Future of Media Project at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The funding situation “is affecting our efforts to hold organizations accountable”, says InfoNile co-founder Fredrick Mugira. “We used to do stories around biodiversity loss, so we would fund journalists to go deep into rainforests in Congo, into parts of Rwanda, but now we have no money.” So now, Mugira warns, “you don’t get stories about logging, about who is cutting the trees.”
Digging in: last chance to save a native forest
It’s an example of the wider impact of US President Donald Trump’s decision to close USAID, which ceased operations in July last year. The federal agency was the world’s largest spender on international development and a significant funder of science-based investigative journalism. And the closure had secondary effects: although InfoNile didn’t receive funding just from the US government, it benefited from the ecosystem of philanthropic foundations and intermediaries that has been left reeling from the US freeze on international aid. Such organizations are often asked to step in and fill holes in funding for other programmes.
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