\n<\/p>\n
In June 2025, a year-long investigation exposed an illegal trade smuggling timber from protected areas in the Congolese rainforest into neighbouring Burundi.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 the world\u2019s second-largest \u2014 to gather material for their exclusive story on the impact on this crucial carbon sink.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s the kind of in-depth investigative work that far exceeds the reporting budgets of most research news publications, such as Nature or Science \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ca disaster\u201d. He adds: \u201cIf you look at the geopolitical situation today, I think science is critical.\u201d There is a need for balanced reporting of science-related topics, but \u201ca lot of that coverage is disappearing\u201d at the exact moment it\u2019s needed, he explains.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The funding situation \u201cis affecting our efforts to hold organizations accountable\u201d, says InfoNile co-founder Fredrick Mugira. \u201cWe 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.\u201d So now, Mugira warns, \u201cyou don\u2019t get stories about logging, about who is cutting the trees.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an example of the wider impact of US President Donald Trump\u2019s decision to close USAID, which ceased operations in July last year. The federal agency was the world\u2019s largest spender on international development and a significant funder of science-based investigative journalism. And the closure had secondary effects: although InfoNile didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
InfoNile\u2019s parent organization, Water Journalists Africa, is a Uganda-based non-profit membership organization, founded in 2011, that connects investigative journalists from some 50 African countries with scientists and activists. A year ago, it had four international organizations pledging support \u2014 now there is just one, says Mugira, who is a fellow in social and economic equity at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.<\/p>\n
The Global Forest Watch project that funded Bizimana and Leku\u2019s investigation cannot continue, and a US-funded project in South Sudan was not renewed after it ended in November last year, Mugira says. InfoNile\u2019s total budget fell from around US$300,000 in 2024 to less than $230,000 for 2025.<\/p>\n
In 2024, US lawmakers earmarked $272 million in foreign assistance for \u2018independent media and free flow of information\u2019, according to US government data. Of this, around $150 million was set aside to support journalism, but the vast majority of that was set to disappear in 2025 and beyond, according to estimates compiled by a group of media-development consortia, including the BBC\u2019s international charity BBC Media Action.<\/p>\n
The media non-profit organization Internews, which is headquartered in Arcata, California, and supports independent media outlets in more than 100 nations, was among the largest recipients of government grants. It said its 2025 allocation of US government funding was $126 million, but that it had now lost 95% of that.<\/p>\n
Its environmental reporting arm \u2014 the Earth Journalism Network \u2014 provides grants enabling journalists from low- and middle-income countries to attend events such as the United Nations COP climate talks, including COP30, which was held in Bel\u00e9m, Brazil, last year.<\/p>\n
In 2025, \u201cwe had five or six grants from the US federal government, both from USAID and the State Department, at the beginning of the year \u2014 they were all halted in January and then terminated later,\u201d says the network\u2019s executive director, James Fahn. He says this has reduced its 2024 budget of around $9 million by between one-quarter and one-third.<\/p>\n
Climate Tracker, headquartered in Quezon City in the Philippines and in Santiago, is another organization that provides travel grants to climate meetings, and also offers training. It said it had only been able to fund some journalists from Latin America to attend last year\u2019s COP, because of funding constraints.<\/p>\n
USAID\u2019s dismantling comes at a time when funding for science journalism is already in decline. Some large foundations funded by philanthropy, such as the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, California, and Robert Bosch Stiftung in Stuttgart, Germany, have scaled back their media funding to focus on supporting science itself.<\/p>\n
Similarly, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a non-profit biomedical research organization in Chevy Chase, Maryland, sharply reduced its support for science journalism in 2024, according to a source who is familiar with the institute\u2019s journalism partnerships, speaking on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n
However, an HHMI spokesperson declined to comment directly, saying: \u201cHHMI\u2019s support for science journalism remains strong and ongoing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grants for science, climate and health news have been falling over the past few years, according to data from Media Impact Funders, a US-based non-profit organization focused on media philanthropy, which includes major foundations and news organizations among its membership. A search at the time of publication using its interactive map shows that philanthropic grants for journalism, news and information containing the keywords science, health and environment had fallen from $86.5 million in 2021 to $63 million in 2023.<\/p>\n
The results are likely to be skewed towards the United States because the information is pulled from the US grant database Candid, which might not include data from some foreign funders, according to Nina Sachdev, deputy director of external affairs at Media Impact Funders. The database also relies on foundations providing data and definitions, so there is a risk of double reporting, she adds.<\/p>\n
However, it gives a general picture of declining funding for science journalism, even before the USAID freeze.<\/p>\n
The funding void triggered by USAID\u2019s closure last year means that foundations are now being inundated with grant applications. Those in the United States, particularly funders focused on science, climate and the environment, have been \u201cbesieged with requests for money, mainly from the research community\u201d, said Meaghan Parker, executive director of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. The non-profit organization in Seattle, Washington, works to increase and improve science journalism, and was created in 1960 as a response to poor-quality reporting after the launches of Soviet Sputnik satellites from the late 1950s.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the priority order of most of these foundations: science first,\u201d she says. \u201cJournalism is falling down the list.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOptions for traditional revenue streams are limited, and philanthropic support, which has long helped sustain our work, continues to decline,\u201d says Cayley Clifford, deputy chief editor of Africa Check, a fact-checking organization in Johannesburg, South Africa, which focuses on science, health and general news. \u201cEnsuring this does not affect the scope of the work we\u2019re able to take on is a top priority for the next few months.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of this comes at a time when science news is critically important to help stem a rising global tide of disinformation and misinformation.<\/p>\n
An Nguyen, a specialist in science journalism in the global south at Bournemouth University in Poole, UK, says: \u201cYou have misinformation, disinformation and a range of global challenges that need public engagement with science \u2014 public health, climate and environment, energy transition, food and water security, AI transformations. For all of these things you need science journalism to be there and strong.\u201d He likens the current situation to fighting a wildfire with a garden hose: \u201cThe blaze is roaming but you only have a trickle of water.\u201d<\/p>\n
Felicity Mellor, director of the science communication unit at Imperial College London, says that science communicators in wealthy countries might now move away from journalism and instead join universities as public-relations professionals. This has the potential to erode trust in science, she says.<\/p>\n
Any report that comes out of an institution is promotional, she adds. \u201cEven if it is strictly just about a piece of research that has happened there, and it is reporting that accurately, it is not looking for balancing voices,\u201d says Mellor. In the long term, ending up with science reporting of this kind alone \u201cimpacts on trust\u201d.<\/p>\n
The cuts will affect mainly freelance journalists and organizations in low- and middle-income countries. One example is Mardoch\u00e9e Boli, a science journalist based in Mali who had to stop a reporting project looking at scientific disinformation there after USAID was closed. \u201cWe had only just started, two months, and then the project was abandoned,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Most science journalists are freelancers, according to a 2022 poll of more than 500 science journalists by the World Federation of Science Journalists and Brazil\u2019s National Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology. In total, 69% of respondents said their work was mainly published on websites, and 26% said their work mostly appeared as part of press releases from academic institutions.<\/p>\n
Some smaller health and environment news services are managing to hold on, because they have enough sources of funding for now. \u201cWe weren\u2019t directly hit because we didn\u2019t have many US funding sources, but we saw some indirect impacts,\u201d says Elaine Fletcher, editor-in-chief of Health Policy Watch, a grant-funded news service based in Geneva, Switzerland. She gives the loss of one or two smaller grants and a slowdown in pending grant applications as examples.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were able to compensate by more diversification of our donor outreach and, in fact, are ending 2025 in a better position than 2024,\u201d says Fletcher. Alongside advertising revenue, the platform\u2019s 2025 list of supporters included the UK biomedical research funder Wellcome and the Geneva regional administration.<\/p>\n
Rhett Butler, a journalist who founded California-based conservation news service Mongabay, says the platform is still growing. That\u2019s mainly because it doesn\u2019t rely on government funding and has a diverse pool of donors, including the Ford Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, both of which are US-based. Mongabay raised almost $10 million in grants and contributions in 2024 according to its annual report, and Butler says he is expecting funding to rise between 10% and 15% in 2026.<\/p>\n
And there could be a light at the end of the tunnel for some European media organizations, thanks to a programme planned by the European Union.<\/p>\n
In its 2028\u201334 budget plans, EU officials have proposed \u20ac8.6 billion (US$10.2 billion) for AgoraEU, which aims to bring together funding to support culture and media in the bloc, as well as programmes that support EU values, such as equality and democracy. As long as its 27 member states agree, AgoraEU would include \u20ac3.2 billion for MEDIA+, a strand focused on news, video games and audiovisual content.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need other sectors, public sector and philanthropy to step up,\u201d says Fahn. \u201cAnd if they cannot do that, then I fear we are going to see a reduced amount of good, high-quality science and environmental journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on February 19, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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