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Staff and Associates

Alanna Mitchell


Alanna Mitchell is a journalist and author, specializing in translating science into narrative. Her areas of expertise are earth sciences, the environment, social statistics and behavioural trends. Alanna was a journalist at The Globe and Mail for 14 years and, before that, a business journalist for three years at The Financial Post. In 2000, the IUCN and the Reuters Foundation named her the best environmental reporter in the world for her report on the vanishing forests of Madagascar. That led to a term of study in 2002 at Green College, Oxford University, where she studied with Norman Myers.

She is the author of Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis (2009), an international bestseller that won the 2010 Grantham Prize for excellence in environmental reporting, and of Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots (2004). As well, she contributed an essay to Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future (2009) by Tim Flannery.

In 2008, she won the $100,000 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy for a course of study on brain science. It led to a series of articles in the Toronto Star in November 2009.

Affiliations

Education

Languages

English and French.
Ms Mitchell completed her assignment with IISD in December 2010.