DOHA: After winning a fellowship from the renowned Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) graduate has published an in-depth investigation into the impact of climate change on one of India’s poorest communities.
Zach Hollo, a 2015 graduate of NU-Q, spent his summer in Visakhapatnam — a city on India’s southeast coast hit hard by the devastating Cyclone Hudhud in 2014. His project, ‘India: Poverty in the age of climate change,’ looked at the storm’s impact on the slums of Visakhapatnam.
Hollo became a Pulitzer Center Student Fellow following the centre’s February announcement that it would select one NU-Q student for the prestigious fellowship. The fellowship came with a $3,000 reporting grant and one-on-one mentoring from the centre’s network of seasoned international reporters.
“There have always been amazing opportunities to travel as an NU-Q student, through class trips, service learning trips, or the independent project travel programme,” said Hollo.
Hollo’s work appeared in two international publications: PRI’s The World and The Wilson Quarterly, which published a long form piece, “Guardian of the Dispossessed: An Economic Dissident in Modern India.” In these, he talks about climate change’s hardest-hit victims: the economically disenfranchised who, he maintains, bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions. He chronicles the stories of Surama Eesar, an elderly day labourer struggling to find work, and Tirupathirao Mittireddi, who is struggling to repay a $780 loan he took out to feed his family after the storm.
The Peninsula
