Scroll’s Vaishnavi Rathore wins global climate journalism award

Scroll’s Vaishnavi Rathore has won the 2025 CCNow Journalism Award for her reportage on how climate change is making salt harder to produce.

Rathore was awarded in the business and economics category.

She was awarded by the Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration aimed at improving coverage of climate change. The awards programme has for the last five years honoured excellent reporting on critical dimensions of climate change.

The two to three winners in 14 subject-based categories were chosen from more than 1,200 entries from news organisations around the world, said Covering Climate Now.

The story was published in February 2024 as part of Scroll’s Common Ground in-depth reporting project.

Rathore reported on how in recent decades the Arabian Sea has seen more than 50% rise in cyclonic storms, and major increases in their duration and intensity.

For the salt industry in Gujarat, which benefits from the dry and sunny conditions, weather events triggered by climate change have spelt a disaster for the region’s economy and the livelihoods of the state’s salt miners. It has also had an effect on India’s food system.

Gujarat is India’s largest salt-producing state.

The award judges described Rathore’s work as “original and illuminating”, remarking on the connection she drew between local climate data and the anecdotal experiences of labourers who have been impacted.

Read: Climate change is making salt harder to produce

In 2023, journalist Ishan Kukreti had won the Covering Climate Now award in the long-form writing category for his article published on Scroll about India’s compensatory afforestation programme.

Kukreti’s story titled, “India’s ghost plantations in which millions of rupees have been sunk”, was published in January 2022 under Scroll’s Common Ground project.