Neela Banerjee

Neela Banerjee is NPR's Chief Climate Editor. She manages NPR's Climate Desk, which includes editors and reporters around the country. The Climate Desk focuses on making complex science accessible to audiences, spotlighting barriers to addressing climate change, explaining climate solutions and revealing how climate change disproportionately affects marginalized people. The desk works across the NPR newsroom to elevate the network's broad climate coverage, and it coordinates a nationwide collaborative of dozens of member stations aimed at strengthening local climate journalism. The Climate Desk organizes NPR's annual Climate Solutions Week, which draws new audiences by highlighting the people and communities worldwide deploying innovative ideas to cope with the increasing risks from global warming.

Before starting at NPR in April 2020, Banerjee spent five years as senior correspondent at Inside Climate News, where she led the team that revealed how Exxon had conducted its own ambitious climate research as far back as the mid-1970s. The Exxon project spurred public interest lawsuits, won more than a dozen national journalism awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Reporting. Before ICN, Banerjee was the energy and environment reporter in the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau. Prior to that, she was a reporter for The New York Times and had beats as diverse as global energy, the Iraq war and faith in America. She began her journalism career at The Wall Street Journal, where she served mostly as a Russia correspondent. Banerjee grew up all over the U.S., but primarily in southeast Louisiana, and is a graduate of Yale University.