In June 2025, a year-long investigation revealed an illegal trade in timber from protected areas of the Congolese rainforest to neighboring Burundi.
Award-winning Burundian journalist Arthur Bizimana and his collaborator Martin Leku, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, risked their safety by going deep into the rainforest – the second largest in the world – to gather material for their exclusive story on the impact on this crucial carbon sink.
Their mission was financially supported by InfoNile, a journalism network focused on cross-border investigations in the Nile Basin, and Global Forest Watch, a data platform funded by the United Nations Environment Program and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. This is the kind of in-depth investigative work that far exceeds the reporting budgets of most science news publications, such as Nature Or Science – and it gets little attention from mainstream media and newspapers. Often, such reporting is only made possible through grants to journalists from private philanthropies or government donors.
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But as those grants dry up as philanthropic donors tighten their purse strings in the wake of U.S.-led cuts to international development and health budgets, the ability of journalists such as Bizimana and Leku to hold those in power to account diminishes.
Marius Dragomir, a Romanian journalist and director of the Media and Journalism Research Center in Tallinn, a global think tank and research center he founded in 2022, describes the funding threats to science journalism as “a disaster.” He adds: “If you look at the geopolitical situation today, I think science is essential. There is a need for balanced reporting on science-related topics, but “a lot of that coverage disappears” at precisely the time it’s needed, he says.
Grant-funded work is an important part of the science journalism ecosystem. Independent science journalists can apply for reporting grants from organizations such as InfoNile, the Pulitzer Center in Washington, DC, and the European Journalism Center in Maastricht, Netherlands. News organizations are also applying for grants to strengthen their newsrooms or to fully fund their operations. In the United States, for example, about a quarter of mainstream media outlets operate on a nonprofit basis, according to a 2021 study conducted by the Future of Media Project at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The funding situation “affects our efforts to hold organizations accountable,” says Fredrick Mugira, co-founder of InfoNile. “We used to report on biodiversity loss, so we financed journalists to go deep into the rainforests of Congo, into parts of Rwanda, but now we have no money.” So now, Mugira warns, “we no longer hear stories about logging, about who cuts the trees.”
It’s an example of the broader impact of US President Donald Trump’s decision to close USAID, which ceased operations in July last year. The federal agency was the world’s largest spender on international development and a major funder of investigative science journalism. And the shutdown had side effects: Although InfoNile did not receive funding solely from the U.S. government, it benefited from the ecosystem of foundations and philanthropic intermediaries that was shaken by the U.S. freeze on international aid. These organizations are often asked to step in and fill funding gaps in other programs.
InfoNile’s parent organization, Water Journalists Africa, is a Uganda-based nonprofit, founded in 2011, that connects investigative journalists from around 50 African countries with scientists and activists. A year ago, four international organizations pledged their support. Today there is only one, says Mugira, a researcher in social and economic equity at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom.
The Global Forest Watch project that funded Bizimana and Leku’s investigation cannot continue, and a U.S.-funded project in South Sudan was not renewed after ending in November last year, Mugira said. InfoNile’s total budget fell from around $300,000 in 2024 to less than $230,000 for 2025.
In 2024, U.S. lawmakers have earmarked $272 million in foreign aid for “independent media and the free flow of information,” according to the U.S. government. data. Of that, about $150 million has been set aside to support journalism, but the vast majority of that is expected to disappear in 2025 and beyond, according to estimates compiled by a group of media development consortia, including the BBC’s international charity, BBC Media Action.
Reduced support
The nonprofit media organization Internews, headquartered in Arcata, California, and which supports independent media in more than 100 countries, was one of the largest recipients of government grants. He said his US government funding allocation for 2025 was $126 million, but he has now lost 95% of it.
Its environmental reporting arm – Earth Journalism Network – offers grants for journalists from low- and middle-income countries to attend events such as the UN COP climate negotiations, including COP30, held in Belém, Brazil, last year.
In 2025, “we received five or six grants from the U.S. federal government, both from USAID and the State Department, at the beginning of the year – they were all cut off in January and then cut off later,” says the network’s executive director, James Fahn. He says it cut a quarter to a third from his 2024 budget of about $9 million.
Climate Tracker, headquartered in Quezon City in the Philippines and Santiago, is another organization that provides travel grants for climate meetings and also offers training. She said she was only able to fund a few journalists from Latin America to attend last year’s COP, due to financial constraints.
The dismantling of USAID comes at a time when funding for science journalism is already in decline. Some large philanthropically funded foundations, such as the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, California, and the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Stuttgart, Germany, have reduced their funding to media to focus on supporting science itself.
Similarly, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a nonprofit biomedical research organization in Chevy Chase, Maryland, has sharply reduced its support for science journalism in 2024, according to a source familiar with the institute’s journalism partnerships, speaking on condition of anonymity.
However, an HHMI spokesperson declined to comment directly, saying: “HHMI’s support for science journalism remains strong and ongoing. »
Grants for science, climate and health news have declined in recent years, according to data from Media Impact Funders, a U.S. nonprofit focused on media philanthropy that counts major foundations and news organizations among its members. 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 increased from $86.5 million in 2021 to $63 million in 2023.
The results are likely to be biased toward the United States because the information is taken from the U.S. grants database Candid, which may 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.
However, it paints a general picture of a decline in funding for science journalism, even before the USAID freeze.
A growing wave of misinformation
The lack of funding caused by USAID’s shutdown last year means foundations are now inundated with grant applications. In the United States, particularly funders focused on science, climate and the environment, have been “besieged with demands for money, primarily from the research community,” said Meaghan Parker, executive director of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. The Seattle, Washington-based nonprofit works to develop and improve science journalism. It was created in 1960 in response to poor reporting after the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellites in the late 1950s.
“That’s the order of priority for most of these foundations: science first,” she says. “Journalism falls to the bottom of the list.”
“Options for traditional revenue streams are limited, and philanthropic support, which has long helped sustain our work, continues to decline,” says Cayley Clifford, deputy editor of Africa Check, a fact-checking organization in Johannesburg, South Africa, that focuses on science, health and general news. “Ensuring this does not impact the scale of work we are able to undertake is a top priority for the coming months.”
All of this comes at a time when science news is critically important to help stem the growing global tide of disinformation and misinformation.
An Nguyen, a specialist in science journalism in the Global South at Bournemouth University in Poole, UK, says: “There is misinformation, disinformation and a range of global challenges that require public engagement in science – public health, climate and environment, energy transition, food and water security, AI transformations. For all these things, you need present and strong science journalism.” He compares the current situation to fighting a forest fire with a garden hose: “The fire is spreading but you only have a trickle of water. »
Felicity Mellor, director of the science communications unit at Imperial College London, believes that science communicators from rich countries could now move away from journalism and join universities as public relations professionals. This can r could erode trust in science, she said.
Any report from an institution is promotional, she adds. “Even though it’s just research that happened there and it reports it accurately, it’s not trying to balance the voices,” Mellor says. In the long term, finding yourself with scientific reporting of this type alone “has an impact on trust”.
Who is affected?
The cuts will mainly affect independent journalists and organizations in low- and middle-income countries. One example is that of Mordochée Boli, a science journalist based in Mali who had to stop a reporting project on scientific disinformation after USAID was shut down. “We had just started, two months later, then the project was abandoned,” he says.
Most science journalists are freelancers, 2022 study finds survey of more than 500 science journalists by the World Federation of Science Journalists and the Brazilian National Institute of Scientific and Technological Public Communication. In total, 69% of respondents said their work was primarily published on websites, and 26% said their work appeared primarily as part of press releases from academic institutions.
Some small health and environmental information services are managing to hold on, because they currently have sufficient sources of funding. “We weren’t directly affected because we didn’t have a lot of U.S. funding sources, but we saw indirect impacts,” says Elaine Fletcher, editor of Health Policy Watch, a grant-funded news service based in Geneva, Switzerland. She cites the loss of one or two smaller grants and a slowdown in pending grant applications as examples.
“We were able to compensate with greater diversification of our donors and, in fact, we end 2025 in a better position than 2024,” says Fletcher. In addition to advertising revenue, the platform’s list of supporters for 2025 included British biomedical research funder Wellcome and the Geneva regional administration.
Rhett Butler, a journalist who founded the California-based conservation news service Mongabay, says the platform continues to grow. This is mainly because it does not rely on government funding and has a diverse pool of donors, including the Ford Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, both based in the United States. Mongabay has raised nearly $10 million in grants and contributions in 2024 according to its annual reportand Butler says he expects funding to increase between 10% and 15% in 2026.
And there could be a light at the end of the tunnel for some European media, thanks to a program planned by the European Union.
In its 2028-2034 budget plans, EU officials have propose 8.6 billion euros ($10.2 billion) for AgoraEU, which aims to bring together funding to support culture and media in the bloc, as well as programs that support EU values, such as equality and democracy. Subject to the agreement of its 27 member states, AgoraEU would devote 3.2 billion euros to MEDIA+, a component focused on information, video games and audiovisual content.
“We need other sectors, the public sector and philanthropy, to step up,” Fahn says. “And if they can’t do that, then I fear we will see a decline in good quality science and environmental journalism.” »
This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time February 19, 2026.
