Andrew Revkin Biography

Andrew Revkin is one of America’s most honored, experienced and innovative journalists focused on environmental and human sustainability. In 2019, he became the founding director of a new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University's Earth Institute. There he is building programs, training tools and collaborations aimed at bridging gaps between science and society to cut climate risk and spread social and ecological resilience. His Sustain What webcast, launched in March 2020, focuses on identifying pathways to resilience and sustainability in this pandemic time and beyond. Northeastern University Prof. Matt Nisbet, past editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Communication, called the effort “brilliant and pioneering.”

Revkin has written on global environmental change and risk for more than 35 years, reporting from the North Pole to the White House, the Amazon rain forest to the Vatican - mostly for The New York Times.

Before moving to Columbia, Revkin spent a year as a strategic adviser at the National Geographic Society, where he helped expand the Society’s funding, training and support systems for journalism and communication innovations that can advance the human journey and conserve biological diversity in a century of momentous global challenges. He remains a member of the National Geographic Society Executive Committee for Research and Exploration.

From 2016 through early 2018, he was the senior reporter for climate change at the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica. From 2010 through 2016 he wrote his award-winning Dot Earth blog for The Times Opinion section and was the Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University. There, he developed and taught a graduate course called “Blogging a Better Planet” and co-created an award-winning field course on environmental filmmaking.  

Revkin was a staff reporter at The Times from 1995 through 2009, covering issues ranging from threats to New York City’s water supply to the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami and, of course, climate science and policy. In the mid 2000s, he exposed political suppression of climate findings at NASA and editing of federal climate reports by political appointees with ties to the petroleum industry. He made three Arctic reporting trips and was the first Times reporter to file stories, video and photos from the sea ice around the North Pole.

He began reporting on climate change in the 1980s in magazines and never stopped. Revkin has won the top awards in science journalism multiple times, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship and Investigative Reporters & Editors Award. He has written books on the dawn of the Anthropocene, the history of humanity’s relationship with weather, the changing Arctic, global warming and the assault on the Amazon rain forest, as well as three book chapters on science communication.

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