In the often fractious landscape of environmental discourse, S. Gopikrishna Warrier is a steadying presence. As the editorial director of Mongabay-India, Warrier has spent the past seven years cultivating a newsroom that brings light, not heat, to India’s environmental challenges. His calm authority, born of nearly four decades in journalism and communications, has helped steer Mongabay’s Indian bureau from an ambitious idea into a trusted voice across the country’s media and policy spheres.
When Warrier joined Mongabay in 2017, he and Program Director Sandhya Sekar began to build a reporting platform that could bring biodiversity into mainstream public conversation, not as an afterthought to economic growth or social development, but as something fundamentally intertwined with both. Under Warrier’s editorial guidance, that aspiration became reality. Mongabay-India has since published thousands of deeply reported articles across English and Hindi, reaching readers from Kerala to Kashmir, and from coastal islands to Himalayan villages.
Warrier’s career began well before climate journalism became a defined beat. Inspired by pioneers like Darryl D’Monte during his university days, he formally trained in journalism after studying zoology and English literature. He is quick to note that environmental journalism, as a concept, was largely undefined when he started out. His early reporting was shaped by a desire to understand the natural world and its connections to society—a theme that remains central to his work today.
His editorial philosophy at Mongabay is shaped by a clear boundary: this is journalism, not advocacy.
“Our reporting may inspire activism by others,” he says, “but our focus remains on rigorous journalism.”
That clarity of purpose, coupled with an insistence on internal transparency and teamwork, has helped Mongabay-India earn its reputation for credibility.
And impact. Stories like the one from Himachal Pradesh—exposing misallocated forestry investments using geospatial analysis—have not only informed public debate but changed it. Others, such as a pre-election series on environmental politics, were ahead of the curve in pushing climate issues into the national conversation.
Building such a newsroom has required Warrier to draw on more than just editorial instincts. He and Program Director Sandhya Sekar built their team by hiring not the most decorated candidates, but those best suited for the role—and for collaboration.
“Teamwork is absolutely essential,” he says. “Talent alone is not enough.”
The ability to blend technical acumen, scientific literacy, and narrative clarity is part of what sets Mongabay-India apart. It is also what excites Warrier most about the years ahead. Looking forward, he hopes to experiment with short, on-camera video explainers—extending the approach he took in a recent podcast series tracing India’s environmental history from the 1991 economic reforms onward. These aren’t just formats; they are new ways to stitch together context, data, and storytelling for a wider audience.
Yet what motivates him remains constant: curiosity.
“I’m a perpetual student,” he says. That spirit animates his work and spills into his downtime, where he indulges in a lifelong passion for aviation—not from a cockpit, but through online videos and window-seat views of rivers and coastlines from above. “Proxy flying,” he calls it.
His is a leadership style that rarely seeks the spotlight but shapes the course nonetheless. In an age when environmental journalism is often caught in the crosshairs of polarization, Warrier offers a different model—one anchored in patience, precision, and the long view. The stories Mongabay-India publishes may be rooted in India’s landscapes, but their relevance spans the globe. As Warrier sees it, the problems may differ in detail, but their underlying causes are shared. So too, he believes, must be the response.
