In front of their peers, and in the presence of the Minister of Environment and Forests, Government of India, and many leading environmental activists, Subhra Priyadarshini and Amantha Perera were presented with the South Asia Climate Change Award (SACCA) on 30th January 2014 in New Delhi.

Subhra and Amantha have been recognised for their contribution to climate change reporting in their respective country, India and Sri Lanka. They were selected from a group of around 50 leading journalists from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka who have been participating in a fellowship programme organised by Panos South Asia and supported by CDKN since 2012.

A panel of experts selected Subhra and Amantha on the basis of reports filed as part of the fellowship programme which have put new issues on the agenda of decision-makers and helped make visible the challenge of climate compatible development in their respective country.

Amantha Perera is a writer and a multi-media journalist based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His work regularly appears in TIME, Reuters/AlertNet, Inter Press News Service – IPS, and Integrated Regional Information Network – IRIN. He concentrates on coverage on Sri Lanka’s post-conflict situation, humanitarian aid, human rights, climate change and impact on the region and adaptation measures. He has worked extensively in the region and reported from the US, Brazil, India, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Nepal.

He was an international visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, California in 2003/04. He was also part of a team that was awarded the 2012 Prince Albert/United Nations Global Prize for Climate Change Reporting awarded to IPS for its coverage of the Rio+20 Conference. He began his journalism at the Sri Lankan weekly The Sunday Leader in 1998. Twitter: @AmanthaP

Read the reports which Amantha completed for the fellowship here. Some of the highlights include a story on the need for real-time sharing of weather data within the region, and a report on the connections between the economic downturn and planning for disasters.

Subhra Priyadarshini is an award winning science journalist and currently Editor of Nature India, the Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) India operation. She was a deadline-chasing journalist covering politics and sports, fashion and films, crime and natural disasters in mainstream Indian media for over a dozen years. She finally chose to come back to her first love – science – in 2007 launching Nature India. Subhra has been a correspondent with major Indian dailies The Times of India, The Indian Express, The Asian Age, The Telegraph, news agency Press Trust of India (PTI) and environment fortnightly Down To Earth. She worked briefly for the Observer, London.

Subhra received the BBC World Service Trust award for her coverage of the ‘vanishing islands of Sunderbans’ in the Bay of Bengal in 2006. She received letters of commendation from the PTI for her coverage of the Orissa super cyclone in 1999 and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio’s Hindi science programme ‘Vigyan aur Vikas’ (Science and Development) and taught science communication at University of Calcutta.

Read the reports which Subhra completed for the fellowship here. Some of the highlights include a story about the high risk of flooding in peninsular India and the need for a South Asia charter for water, as well as a report from the fragile delta in the Bay of Bengal which found that it is not just climate change that threatens the existence of this world heritage mangrove tiger-land spread across the Indo-Bangladesh border

Visit the fellowship blog to read the excellent reports from other fellows and learn more about the programme.

The awards were presented at the opening ceremony of the 7th CMS Vatavarn (environmental) film festival and forum.