Workshops

Rishika is a freelance environment reporter covering science, law and policy. She is based in Bengaluru.

Here are some of the story links which were discussed during the session.
https://www.indiaspend.com/earthcheck/meant-to-ward-off-coastal-erosion-geotubes-in-andhra-odisha-lie-in-tatters-751165
https://www.indiaspend.com/erratic-monsoon-driven-by-climate-change-damaged-25-crops-in-karnatakas-kaveri-basin
https://carboncopy.info/india-and-the-case-for-a-national-energy-transition-plan/
https://science.thewire.in/politics/rights/migrant-workers-among-the-most-vulnerable-to-himalayan-disasters/
https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/himalayan-dams-elatin/
https://dialogue.earth/en/food/indias-palm-oil-drive-faces-reality-check/

Jayashree Nandi is an environment and climate correspondent at Hindustan Times. She primarily covers climate science and UN climate negotiations; weather; environmental policy; environmental litigation; and people’s stories.

Nandi won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award in the Environment, Science, and Technology category for 2021. She also won the Centre for Media Studies Young Environment Journalist of the Year award in 2019 and the merit award for sustained environmental reporting on the environment at the fourth Asian Environmental Journalism Awards (AEJA) in 2015. She has taken up a number of journalism fellowships including the Biodiversity Media Initiative fellowship of the Earth Journalism Network and Promise of Commons Media Fellowship of Foundation for Ecological Security.

Here are some of the story links which were discussed during the session.

https://www.climatechangeauthority.gov.au/reviews/using-international-units-help-meet-australias-emissions-reduction-targets/abbreviations-and
https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/lakshadweep-its-corals-and-indigenous-people-surviving-changing-climate
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/indian-farmers-are-already-paying-price-climate-change
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/election-in-pincodes-ballia-s-oppressive-heat-takes-toll-on-lives-livelihoods-101712601033041.html
https://climate.copernicus.eu/
https://ruralindiaonline.org/article/not-just-a-coal-block-hasdeo-arand

Ishteyaque Ahmad leads the research at Regenerative Bihar and has a rich grassroots experience on food systems.
Here is the session recording and the PPT shared by the trainer.

Here are the stories discussed during our fun activity of 'Bring Your Climate Story'
1.  These children in a coastal Bengal village are championing environmental change
2. No childhood in the mangroves: What is the climate change’s toll on Sundarbans youth
3. ‘Chorabari glacier near Kedarnath retreating 7m per year’
4. Climate tests Nanda Gawali women who hold pastoral economy together
5. Myanmar’s mangrove charcoal feeds Thai tables, fells forests
6. A win-win: Irula community prospers with the mangrove forests of Pichavaram
7.  Instagram, Instagram
8. PwC studies emissions of India’s top 100 listed companies. But highlights only half the story
9. Interactive Photo-Story
10. Eco India: How Delhi's informal workers turn climate messengers to tackle extreme heat
11. In the remote, tribal villages of Gadchiroli, climate change is breeding malaria
12. ‘No land, no home, no future’: Himalayan Lepchas fear new dam
13. Addressing climate vulnerabilities in a conference of panchayats
14. धक्कादायक… वाढत्या प्रदूषणामुळे पुरुषांमध्ये वांझपणा वाढतोय, मात्र दोष दिला जातोय घरातील महिलेला!
15. A bridge too far out
16. देशाचे पहिले मधाचे गाव असलेल्या ‘मांघर’ची ‘मधुक्रांती’ संकटात…

This is the third mandatory session of the fellowship.Trainer Dr. Jaya Shreedhar is a medical doctor and award winning health journalist based in India with over 25 years of experience in public health communications and media development, focused on the intersectional aspects of health security with governance, gender, crisis/conflict, development and planetary/One Health. She is Internews’ Senior Health Media Advisor and Adjunct Professor, Health Journalism at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. Her professional working experience reflects a deeper focus on AIDS, TB, COVID-19, reproductive health and NCDs. She has served as a member of the global guideline development group for WHO’s Consolidated Guideline on Self-Care Interventions for Health Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (2019), and as consultant to UNAIDS (Geneva and India), UNDP, WHO, UNICEF, USAID’s AIDS Prevention And Control project (APAC) in Tamil Nadu and India’s National AIDS Control Organization. Dr.Shreedhar has nearly 20 years of experience as a trainer and mentor, building the capacity of journalists from developing and developed countries towards quality health journalism.

Here are the stories discussed during our third mandatory session:
1.  South Delhi’s mosquito density up by 50% in a year: Survey

2. Kyasanur Forest Disease: A ticking health bomb in the Western Ghats

3. How Unseasonal Rains Are Extending Malaria Transmission Windows

4. Sonbhadra’s Malaria Crisis: How Collaboration, Rigorous Surveillance Can Help

Our trainer Cheena Kapoor is a Delhi-based independent journalist and photographer focusing on climate change, public health, and gender. Her work has been published by Devex, Fuller Project, Dialogue Earth, The Guardian, John Hopkins, and Al Jazeera, among many others. Her long-term photo project "Forgotten Daughters" about abandoned women in Indian mental asylums has been widely published and exhibited across Asia and Europe.

Here are the stories discussed during our third mandatory session:
1. Indian start-ups mine e-waste for battery minerals but growing industry has a dark side
2. Hospitals in Uttarakhand struggle to provide care due to lack of water
3. India has made remarkable progress cutting maternal deaths. Could climate change pose a threat?

Here is the recording for the session. Our trainer for this mandatory session, Harjeet Singh, is an activist advocating for climate and social justice globally. He is the Founding Director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation and Global Convenor of the “Fill The Fund” campaign. He specialises in advancing just transitions, strengthening adaptation and resilience programmes, and addressing climate impacts and migration.
 
Harjeet also serves as the Strategic Advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. 
 
Previously, he served as the Head of Global Political Strategy at Climate Action Network (CAN) International and led ActionAid’s global climate justice programme. Harjeet has also held board positions at CAN International and the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR). 
 
Currently, he is a member of the United Nations’ Technical Expert Group on Comprehensive Risk Management, under the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. Harjeet has authored and overseen numerous publications on climate justice and disaster resilience.

Our trainer for this session, Dr Kathiresan C, is an Associate Professor at National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, with extensive grasp of GPDP and policies around it.
Here are some of the links useful for accessing GPDP for your panchayat as well as other relevant data.
1. https://egramswaraj.gov.in/
2. https://nreganarep.nic.in/netnrega/MISreport4.aspx
3. https://missionantyodaya.dord.gov.in/ 

Our trainer Bharati Chaturvedi is the founder of Chintan, a non-profit that focuses on Circular Economy, Waste, Air Pollution and Climate Change.

Our trainer Roli Srivastava is a Mumbai-based journalist and reports on just transition, gender, migration and inclusive economies, focusing mainly on India’s marginalized communities. She has worked with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where she was Climate and Just Transition Correspondent, India, and major Indian newspapers including The Hindu where she was Deputy Editor and The Times of India where she was Editor, Special Projects. She has won the Fetisov Journalism Award and the Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity for her investigation on a health scandal in rural India robbing women of their wombs. She undertakes training workshops  for journalists.

Our trainer Nidhi Jamwal is an independent journalist, who has been reporting on environment and rural issues for over 20 years now. Through this time she has worn multiple hats: she has been a reporter, an editor, and has done extensive work in training rural journalists on reporting grassroots stories from intersectional angles, analysing data and understanding climate bottom-up.

Our trainer Rahul Singh is an independent reporter covering environmental issues in the eastern part of the country. He launched 'Climate East', an environment-focused public communication platform, to deliver ground reports, articles, data stories, and visual and audio content centred on environmental issues in Eastern India to generate awareness. 

This session was to help the fellows gauge the process, technicalities, funding and focus for opening an independent climate outlet. 

Our trainer Sofia Juliet Ranjan is an editor and researcher at IIHS. Part of the Word Lab, she focuses on bridging research and public discourse through writing, editorial strategy, and publication development. A former journalist, she collaborates on diverse publications, leads writeshops and editorial trainings.

This session was to help the fellows delve into underreported stories at the intersection of climate and migration.
Some of the stories discussed and the resources shared by the trainer are:
1. Shifting Grounds: telling the climate migration story in India, is designed as a resource to build responsible storytelling on rural to urban migration in the context of climate change. It highlights the importance of recognising migration as adaptation.

2. Internal Migration and Climate Resilience in India This report reviews 94 interventions at the national, state (Karnataka and Kerala), and city levels (Bengaluru and Kochi) to assess whether current development, labour, and climate change policies and programmes recognise and address the needs of internal migrants). 

All these resources are available on the project website Climate Local Adaptation Pathways (CLAPs) project which hosts more resources in the form of reports, journal papers, multimedia outputs and blogs.
3. https://101reporters.com/article/environment/Uprooted_by_climate_change_Uttarakhands_villagers_battle_for_survival_in_Delhi
4. https://scroll.in/article/1048724/from-odisha-to-kerala-a-bus-of-climate-migrants
5. https://climateadaptationpathways.iihs.co.in/understanding-migration-through-public-datasets/

Our trainer Kartik Chandramouli Senior Digital Editor at Mongabay India, where he works with a network of journalists, filmmakers, photographers, and illustrators to produce multimedia stories about the environment and conservation.

This session was to help the fellows learn about the art of visualising climate change through effective photographs which tell the story, along with the responsibility and ethics associated with capturing communities.

The resources shared by the trainer are available in the PPT shared.

Our trainer, Madan Meena is a practising painter and folklore researcher and navigate between material culture, languages and traditional craft practices. The communities and their knowledge systems are at the centre of his work. He belongs to the Meena community from Rajasthan.

This session is to help the fellows explore the non-economic impacts of climate change and help find ideas on this underreported intersection of climate.

Our trainer, Samatha( Sam) is a communications and programs professional based in India, currently leading communications and partnerships at Mindworks Lab , an international social change agency that helps people move from a place of powerlessness to one of agency. With over a decade of experience, Sam specialises in strategic communications, narrative building, and capacity development around storytelling, reporting, and audience insights.

Her expertise lies in audience-informed narrative strategies that drive collective impact, particularly across climate and social change movements. She has worked across India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Southeast Europe, helping organisations strengthen their communication ecosystems and build compelling, human-centered narratives.

Currently, Sam is focused on building narrative ecosystems across the Global South to make climate storytelling more cohesive, collaborative, and powerful , amplifying a collective signal for change.

This optional session looked at the idea of telling climate stories beyond the gloom and doom.

Our trainer, Mahtab Alam is a multilingual journalist, writer and media & communications trainer with nearly two decades of experience in the field of media and development sector. He was founding executive editor of The Wire Urdu and the managing editor of NFI Media Fellowship program. Over the years, he has been a mentor to dozens of young reporters and journalists across the world as part of NFI, ICFJ and other media fellowships, covering impactful ground stories.

This session is to help the fellows understand how to apply to fellowships, prepare budget documents and what stands out in a grant application.

Our trainer, Arpitha Kodiveri is an environmental law and justice scholar and assistant professor of political science at Vassar College. Her work focuses on the role of law in the context of redressing climate harms faced by indigenous communities in South Asia. Her previous research examines land conflicts and legal mobilisation by forest-dwelling communities in India. She has worked as an environmental lawyer supporting Adivasi and forest-dwelling communities in India. She is the recipient of the Hans Kelsen Fellowship at the EUI and the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Our trainer, Mukul Sharma is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. He has published eighteen books and booklets in English and Hindi, the latest being, Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environment Justice. Mukul worked as a Special Correspondent in Navbharat Times, Delhi (1983-1998), and received 12 national-international awards for his environmental, rural and human rights journalism.

Our trainer, Sweta Daga is a multimedia storyteller, independent journalist and community facilitator based in Bangalore, India. She has tried to cover her country with stories from all four corners of India from Arunachal Pradesh to Kashmir, Lakshadweep to Tamil Nadu and in between. She focuses on climate justice, gender, and queer stories. She is a National Media Award winner, along with being a Centre for Science and Environment, Earth Journalism Network and People’s Archive of Rural India Fellow. She has co-created and produced India’s only environmental reality television show on NDTV, co-directed a documentary film (in post production currently) on Jainism, and is a theater actor and playwright. She is also a community facilitator, hosting week-long events for journalists, artists, activists, and changemakers from across India. She bicycles all over Bangalore, has a house overrun by books, and never has on matching socks for some reason.

Our trainer, Swati Sanyal Tarafdar is an independent journalist and an accredited trainer in Solutions Journalism, who has solid experience in developing curriculum, instructional designing and learning behaviours. As a journalism trainer, she helps journalists and newsrooms around the globe adopt Solutions Journalism and Complicating the Narratives frameworks, both of which are rigorous, investigative techniques for telling stories that are complete, inclusive, all-encompassing.

Some of the stories and resources discussed during the session are:
1. https://writetoupbeat.substack.com/p/indias-heat-insurance-plans-look

2. https://triplepundit.com/2025/desertification-nigeria-wall-trees/ 

3. https://triplepundit.com/2025/low-emission-zone-brussles-warsaw-krakow/ 

4. The Solutions Journalism Tracker is a good place to look for climate solutions-

https://storytracker.solutionsjournalism.org/

5. Here's how to book a mentoring session with Swati Tarafdar - https://topmate.io/swati_sanyal/748431

This session will be led by our trainer Dr R Padmavati who currently holds the position of Director at Schizophrenia Research Foundation, (SCARF, India).

She completed her Postgraduate Psychiatry degree at the University of Bombay, India and since then has been with SCARF for over 28 years. She has been involved in several research areas like epidemiological studies, drug trials, untreated schizophrenia, culture and psychoses, metabolic disorders in mental illness. Her key interests have been in socio-cultural aspects of Mental illnesses. She has a keen interest in psychosocial rehabilitation. She has extensively published and is a reviewer of many national and international psychiatric journals. She teaches postgraduate students of Psychiatry and guides postgraduate dissertations.

Here's an interesting article Dr Padmavati shared: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EBkC9Ia12NIGqCROfHPbVbBXm1--JXg6/view?usp=drive_link

Parth MN is an independent journalist based in Mumbai. He reports for several Indian and international publications. His main focus area is rural India and marginalised communities. He writes on human rights violations and has received 16 national and international awards for his work.

This was hosted Mijing Narzary, a Khomlainai coach and currently serves as the Chief Coach of the Bodoland Indigenous Games Association. Since 2009, he has also been actively teaching boxing. Khomlainai is a traditional martial art of the Bodo community in Assam and coach Mijing has been passionately promoting and teaching Khomlainai across Assam and beyond.

This session wanted to bring in first-hand experiences of climate risks faced by women players and coach of an indigenous sports which already struggles with resource challenges.

This session is to understand what unfolds on the ground about climate-associated work in a village. The guest, Sharda Shende heads the local government(panchayat) in Bela Bhandara village in Maharashtra.