In 2025, Mongabay’s team of multimedia journalists won international journalism prizes for audio, visual and digital storytelling. The content they produced range from an immersive audio series exploring bioacoustics, to a visually rich investigation into organized crime, and a video on reviving Indigenous culture.
Mongabay strives to meet people where they are and make high-quality reporting available to as many people as possible. These awards are a recognition of the type of multimedia work that Mongabay plans to expand upon over the coming year.
Digital
Mongabay Latam won two major awards: first place in the large outlet category of the Global Shining Light Award, and first place for digital storytelling in the Future of Media award. The winning story for both awards, “Indigenous leaders killed as narco airstrips cut into their Amazon territories,” found that 67 airstrips have been carved into the Peruvian Amazon for drug flights. The team used satellite imagery and AI to identify potential sites for these airstrips, then spent a year interviewing more than 60 sources and traveling to the region to ground-truth the findings. What emerged was a data-rich picture of the deadly toll that narcotrafficking has had on Indigenous communities and the forest. The investigation found that at least three reserves set aside for Indigenous people living in voluntary isolation have been inundated with six illegal airstrips.
Written
Mongabay’s Malavika Vyawahare was one of 12 recipients of the 2025 Sustainability, Environmental Achievement & Leadership (SEAL) award. The award is given to journalists whose “work has illuminated the urgent realities of climate change and environmental justice around the world,” the SEAL website notes. Vyawahare’s 2025 work includes stories about a Qatari-backed project to build luxury accommodation near a giant tortoise habitat in Seychelles, the dangers of PFAS “forever chemicals” in breast milk in Africa, and fires that threaten rare lemurs in Madagascar.
Podcast
A Mongabay India podcast produced by Shreya Dasgupta, Kartik Chandramouli and Abhijit Shylanath collected three awards; First place for regional audio from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA), first place for best science and medical podcast from the Podcast Publisher Awards, and first place for best produced science show from the India Audio Summit Awards. The team won for their three-part series, Wild Frequencies, which explores how researchers in India are using bioacoustics to locate, monitor and better understand the country’s wildlife.
Video
Contributors Matthew Reichel and Robyn Huang won second place for best coverage of Indigenous communities at the Indigenous Media Awards. Their short film, “Youth leaders revive Indigenous seafood harvesting heritage,” follows young Indigenous people in Canada reclaiming cultural traditions by freediving for seafood that they provide to the community. “It’s food for the soul and it’s … food to actually eat,” Brycen George, coordinator of the Ucluelet Warrior Program, told Mongabay.
Banner image: Seema Lokhandwala records elephant calls at Kaziranga National Park. Image courtesy of Vijay Bedi.
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