Staff
Philip Jacobson

Philip Jacobson

About

Philip Jacobson is a senior editor and investigative journalist for Mongabay, now based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is currently investigating the global shark trade as part of a yearlong Pulitzer Center fellowship on ocean journalism, with extensive reporting from Latin America and elsewhere. Before that, he uncovered a massive illegal shark finning scheme and widespread labor abuses taking place across the fleet of a major Chinese tuna company. Findings from that series were the centerpiece of a US Treasury Department announcement of sanctions against the firm, its owner and all of its vessels. The series also preceded a ban by the multilateral WCPFC on gear used to target sharks in much of the Pacific Ocean.

Since joining Mongabay in 2015, Jacobson has also done extensive reporting on the forestry, plantation and mining sectors, especially in Indonesia. Notable recent works include breaking the story that a major coal company was planning to demolish thousands of hectares of rainforest in North Kalimantan to make wood pellets for electricity (after which South Korea announced it would phase out subsidies for such projects) and a data-driven piece revealing the extent to which traditional small farmers have been criminally prosecuted and imprisoned as part of the Jokowi administration’s war on haze and wildfires. With the ability to operate in several different languages, he often builds databases out of hard-to-access public records in places such as Brazil and Borneo and frequently works with filmmakers, programmers and local reporters to tell hidden and ambitious stories. A broad swath of his work marries investigative and narrative forms. He also serves as a commissioning editor for Mongabay, guiding staff and freelancers in the production of their own journalism.

From 2017 to 2019, he co-authored the “Indonesia for Sale” series about politicians using shell companies as vehicles to sell plantation permits to major corporations, working principally with Tom Johnson of The Gecko Project, which co-produced the series alongside Mongabay. One of the articles won a Society of Environmental Journalism (SEJ) award for investigative reporting; another received a Fetisov Journalism Award for environmental reporting. Jacobson subsequently worked on a joint investigation with BBC News and Gecko about inequities in Indonesia’s palm oil smallholders program, which won the 2023 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting, and on a 2020 piece with Al Jazeera’s 101 East program, Gecko and the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism about a suspicious $22m “consultancy” payment made by a palm oil company in Papua, which was named a finalist in two categories of the 2021 Online Journalism Awards.In 2018, Jacobson tracked down former Asia Pulp & Paper employees for a story that all but proved the conglomerate was secretly controlling a forest-clearing operation despite its repeated public denials and its own zero-deforestation commitment; the revelations were a factor in the Forest Stewardship Council terminating APP’s application for membership, which would have let the firm market its products under the FSC’s green label. His work has also been recognized by Longform.org, with multiple awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) and by the Pantau Foundation’s Oktovianus Pogau Award for Courage in Journalism, which he received after being imprisoned on the island of Borneo in 2020.