We conduct independent, cross-border investigations into climate obstruction.
Climate accountability — investigating and understanding the various drivers of delay on climate action — is critical to understanding and addressing climate change.
We produce stories across multiple formats—audio, digital, video and newsletter—and collaborate in a variety of ways.
Our work includes both print and audio stories, and we also co-publish with a variety of other publications. Our podcast is distributed by Pushkin and available wherever you listen to podcasts. Our handle on all social platforms is @drilledmedia. We work with partners in a variety of ways, from co-reporting projects to syndicating content; if you’re interested in collaborating with us, please get in touch!
Our weekly newsletter rounds up the top 5 stories or studies on climate accountability that we’re reading this week; it’s never longer than a 10-minute read and lots of people tell us it’s how they stay up to date on climate. You can sign up for it here.
Support Our Work!
We offer a paid subscription to our newsletter, and to the podcast if you’d like to listen to it ad-free (that option is available via Pushkin+ or Patreon).
Because we are a fiscally sponsored project of the arts & culture project Fractured Atlas, individuals can also make a tax-deductible donation here. We are also part of Ida Collective, a Netherlands-based public interest organization with 501c3 equivalency status, so organizations and foundations may donate directly to us as well. Please get in touch to find out how!
Our Back Story
Drilled was started as an audio project by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt in 2017. Westervelt had been a print climate reporter for 15 years by that point, and a staff reporter for the NPR station in Reno for two years. She was looking for a story that could be turned into a reported narrative podcast, and she found it in the dozen or so climate liability cases filed in the wake of the ExxonKnew reporting that documented Exxon’s knowledge of climate change and the role of fossil fuels in exacerbating it, beginning in the 1970s. While sitting in a courtroom in San Francisco, Westervelt looked around at the lawyers and the activists and the scientists and thought “aha, what about a true crime podcast about climate change?”
Drilled was a hit, and has grown from what was going to be one limited-run audio series into an ongoing investigative reporting project digging into the various forces obstructing action on climate.
This rigorously reported investigative show, also hosted by Amy Westervelt, was originally billed as a limited series when it debuted in 2016, promising to tackle the causes of climate change through the lens of the biggest podcast genre of all — true crime.
“Superb work in print and audio.” —Bill McKibben
“A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the secret history of climate-change denial.” —Sarah Larson
Awards
Our team has received multiple Covering Climate Now awards, as well as an Online News Association Award, Edward R. Murrow awards, and a Peabody nomination
Meet the Team
Executive Editor, Investigative Journalist
Amy Westervelt
Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative climate journalist who has been on the climate beat for more than 20 years, reporting for a wide range of outlets over the years, including ProPublica, The Guardian, The Nation, Inside Climate News, The Washington Post, The Intercept, NPR, and many more. Despite her move into audio in the past 10 years, Amy still reports and writes regularly for a wide range of publications. In 2023 she was named a Covering Climate Now’s Journalist of the Year. Her work has previously received Murrow, ONA, SEJ, Rachel Carson, and Folio awards, as well as a Peabody nomination.
Senior Editor, Investigative Journalist
Alleen Brown
Alleen Brown is an independent investigative journalist based in New York. Her reporting on state and corporate repression of Indigenous-led Dakota Access Pipeline opponents at Standing Rock has been cited in civil rights cases, reports submitted to international human rights bodies, and more than a dozen books. Her award-winning investigation mapping over 6,500 prisons against heat, wildfire, and flood risk has provided foundational information for organizers and policymakers defining what climate change will mean for mass incarceration. She was previously a staff reporter at The Intercept and has written for Grist, The Guardian, Inside Climate News, The Appeal and other publications.
Senior Global Climate Justice Reporter
Nina Lakhani
Nina Lakhani has reported from more than a dozen countries including six years investigating health scandals, deaths in custody and honor-based violence for The Independent newspapers in London and seven years freelancing in Mexico and Central America covering state-sponsored repression, consequences of the war on drugs, gender-based violence and the battle for natural resources. Most recently she spent six years as senior climate and environmental justice reporter for the Guardian based in New York covering the intersection between structural racism and poverty with extreme weather events, the climate impact of war, and the criminalization of defenders, as well unequal access to water, food and clean air across the US. She is the author of Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet which has been translated into Spanish, French and Italian, and is a contributor to the 2025 anthology Gaza: the Story of a Genocide (chapter: Ecocide in Gaza). Before journalism she was a mental health nurse, and a proponent of trauma informed reporting. She is based in Mexico City.
Senior Producer
Martin Zaltz-Austwick
Martin is a musician, writer, award-winning podcaster, performer, coder and recovering physicist. He has sound-designed, composed music, and produced episodes and podcasts for The Allusionist, Love + Radio, Death of an Artist, Twenty Thousand Hertz, and many more. He heads up production on all Drilled audio projects.
Reporter (Australia)
Royce Kurmelovs
Royce Kurmelovs is an Australian freelance journalist and author. His books include The Death of Holden (2016), Rogue Nation (2017), Boom and Bust (2018) and Just Money (2020). His fifth book, SLICK, on the fossil fuel industry’s capture of the Australian government, is available now. He reports on Australia for Drilled.
Reporter (India)
Rishika Pardikar
Pardikar is an Indian environmental journalist tracking science, law and policy. Her areas of expertise are climate change and biodiversity, both nationally within India and internationally with a keen focus on negotiations under UNFCCC and UNCBD. Her work has appeared in The Lever/ Jacobin, Foreign Policy, science magazines like AGU’s Eos, China Dialogue and Indian media like The Hindu and The Wire. She lives in Bangalore.
Podcast Editor, US
Audrey Quinn
Audrey Quinn is a podcast editor and audio reporter. She edited the Pulitzer Prize-winning first season of Suave from Futuro Media and Season 3 of the Pulitzer and Peabody Award-winning podcast Stolen. She hosted Aftereffect from WNYC Studios, which won a Newswomen’s Club of New York Award and was a Scripps Howard and Third Coast finalist. Her investigative work has been recognized by PRNDI and Deadline Club awards, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Type Investigations, and published in the New York Times. In 2017 she was a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Reporting Fellow.
Reporter (Uganda)
Diana Taremwa-Karakire
Diana Taremwa Karakire is a freelance environmental journalist based in Uganda. In 2020, she was among eight young journalists in Africa participating in the Climate Tracker Environment reporting fellowship. She was also a 2021 gender justice fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation and a 2021 and 2022 Indigenous stories grantee with Earth Journalism Network (EJN). Her work has been published by Equal Times, Ubuntu Times, African Business magazine, Climate Tracker, and the Earth Journalism Network.
Reporter (U.S)
Maddie Stone
Maddie Stone is a science journalist who has a doctorate in earth and environmental sciences, an accolade she earned after digging deep into the soils of Puerto Rico’s rainforests and using lab equipment to unspool the biogeochemical mysteries that define the space between forest floor and bedrock. Stone is the former science editor of the technology website Gizmodo and the founding editor of Gizmodo’s Earther, which is focused on climate. She has also edited articles for The Verge, Polygon, and Grist. Stone’s award-winning journalism has appeared in National Geographic, Drilled, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Grist, Vice, MIT Technology Review, and many other outlets.
Senior podcast producer
Sarah Ventre
Sarah is a Peabody-nominated audio producer best known for her work reporting, producing and co-hosting Unfinished: Short Creek, a podcast from Critical Frequency and Stitcher about a fundamentalist Mormon community on the Utah-Arizona border. It was named one of the best podcasts of 2020 by The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and won a Wilbur Award for excellence in religion reporting. Sarah was also reporter, writer and managing producer for Witnessed: Mystic Mother and senior producer on the Peabody-nominated season 2 of This Land. She was most recently senior religion producer at NPR.
Our Contributors
Our cross-border series pull together reporters from all over the globe to look at particular issues, themes, and trends from a variety of perspectives. We are proud to work with some of the best reporters out there, including:
Reporter, Nigeria
Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo
Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo is an award-winning environmental journalist and the recipient of several journalism awards including the UNEP Young Environmental Journalist 2012, 2019 Green Accord Environmental Award, Italy and UNFCCC CDM-African Radio Contest 2011. She created, produced and presented the most popular environmental show on Nigerian TV, Green Angle on TVC News. She has hosted the BBC World Service’s Environmental Radio Programme, Local Warming. Ugochi comes from one of Nigeria’s oil producing states. Her community, Amuch, has been ravaged by erosion—a key factor that inspired her passion to pursue environmental journalism. She currently works as a freelance journalist covering environmental issues across Africa and Europe, and co-hosts Djoliba – a multi language African radio show on RadioX Basel, Switzerland.
Reporter, Canada
Martha Troian
Martha Troian is an award-winning independent journalist and writer. Specializing in investigative journalism, she has worked for and contributed to media outlets across North America for close to 15 years, often writing about Indigenous politics, justice, crime, data deficits, and environmental and human rights issues. She was the McLaughlin Centre Science Journalism fellow with the William Southam Journalism Fellowship at Massey College, University of Toronto for 2019-2020. Previously she was a participant of the Investigative Journalism Intensive Program at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Currently, she is working as a producer with the Institute for Investigative Journalism probing water contamination and Indigenous communities. She is proudly from Lac Seul First Nation and Wabauskang First Nation in northwestern Ontario, and a mother to her young son.
Reporter, Australia
Lyndal Rowlands
Lyndal Rowlands is a freelance journalist. Her audio journalism can be found on Drilled, Damages, First Eat with Nakkiah Lui: an Audible Original, Life Matters on ABC Radio National and 7am. Her writing has been published by The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, SBS and Inter Press Service, where she was a UN Correspondent. Lyndal’s work has been recognised with a UN Correspondents Association prize for climate journalism, a UN Foundation Press Fellowship and a UnionDocs Pod-Pod residency. She’s a member of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, The Science Journalist Association of Australia and the Society of Environmental Journalists. She was born in a valley full of brown coal mines and her favourite sound is a magpie warbling. Lyndal is based in Australia.
Reporter, Mozambique
Estacio Valoi
Estacio Valoi is a Mozambican journalist and photographer who focuses on environmental crime and corruption in his country. He has worked on stories related to the poaching of rhino and elephants, the vast amount of corruption in the gemstone and timber industries, and other issues. Valoi advises Oxpeckers, a data-driven journalism group, on a broad range of environmental problems in the region. He has covered a range of environmental investigations for Mozambique’s Zambeze daily newspaper and international media. He helped establish Zambeze and is newsroom chief editor in Quelimane, in northern Mozambique. His investigations have been featured by the Forum for African Investigative Reporters, German radio station DW, South African TV station SABC, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and e.tv.
Our Reporting Process
We do not allow any editorial influence, including from foundations through which we receive grant funding; editorial independence is written into our funding contracts. We independently report every story we publish and do our best to report accurately, fairly, and truthfully, wherever the facts lead. We have a rigorous fact-checking and legal review process, and link to primary documents wherever possible. That said, we don’t believe that “objective” means toothless, or necessitates false equivalence.
If we have documentation of malfeasance, we say so. For too many years the notion of objectivity in journalism has been used as a cudgel to scare off investigative reporters, and to imbue the status quo with a value it doesn’t necessarily deserve. We strive to hold the powerful accountable across industries and across the political spectrum by following the story.
When corrections and clarifications come to our attention, we update articles and podcast episodes accordingly, note the correction, and make any needed changes to headlines, summaries, and social media.
If you spot inaccuracies in our reporting, please let us know: amy [at] drilled.media
Conflicts of Interest and Editorial Independence
As an investigative newsroom focused on climate accountability, it is imperative that we retain strict editorial independence from funders, advertisers, and others who would seek to influence our coverage. As such, we do not discuss our investigations with anyone external to staff until they are published. We include an editorial independence clause in all funding contracts with advertisers and grant funders, so that it is clear from day one that they will not be looped into editorial conversations or plans. If funders attempt to influence our coverage, we will dissolve our contract with them and funds already given will be forfeited (and yes, we have done that; thankfully only once!).
Our approach to collaboration
We work with partners in a variety of ways, from co-reporting projects to syndicating content; if you’re interested in collaborating with us, please get in touch!
Our most deeply held belief is that you cannot hope to successfully erode the power of extractive industries in this world by behaving extractively yourself, and that belief guides how we work with reporters and how we collaborate with other organizations.
We are very careful to work with reporters who are based in, and/or are from, the countries and regions we’re reporting on and to craft risk assessments that are tailored to each.
We are also very determined to support the reporters we’re working with, not to control them or set ourselves up as gatekeepers. Reporters keep all rights to their work. They are not only allowed, but encouraged, to pitch additional stories based on their reporting for us to other outlets. And when one of their stories is co-published by a partner, they’re part of that process and brought into that relationship as well.
As we grow our reporting network, we will continue to prioritize the safety and autonomy of our reporters, and check in with them regularly about how we can best be supporting their work, particularly as a big part of our goal is to grow the global population of investigative climate accountability reporters and thus the volume of investigative climate accountability stories.
We take a similar approach to collaborating with other outlets: our goal is to produce better, more impactful work, not to secure more credit or money or accolades for ourselves.
Collaborators
We are proud members of the Covering Climate Now global journalism collaboration and the Global Investigative Journalism Network, and have had the good fortune of partnering with a number of excellent outlets as well, including:
Contact
Please get in touch to:
- Syndicate our reporting
- Collaborate on a reporting project
- Notify us of spotted inaccuracies in our reporting
- Provide a tip
- Pitch us a story
@drilledmedia editors@drilled.media
Funding
Grants
Drilled received early funding for the first season of the podcast from the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. Thank you to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project for providing launch support for Drilled Local. The FILE Foundation provided seed funding for the Damages podcast, and supports ongoing investigative climate reporting. The Doc Society Climate Story Fund, William M. Kohler Foundation, and Broad Reach Foundation have all provided funding to help us expand our reporting team. Earth Percent provided seed funding for our Petroganda project. We have also received grants to support our reporting from: The Pulitzer Center, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Family Foundation and Luminate. If your organization would like to talk about supporting cross-border climate accountability journalism, please get in touch. We maintain strict editorial independence from our funders, via terms that are outlined and agreed to in any funding contract we sign.
We are actively seeking additional funding. As additional organizations provide funding for Drilled, we will update this list.
Memberships
We also receive funding directly from readers via paid subscriptions to the newsletter and the Drilled Patreon, as well as subscriptions on Apple and Spotify for ad-free and bonus podcast episodes.
Privacy
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