Costanza Gambarini

Costanza Gambarini has made a name for herself through groundbreaking and impactful environmental investigations. She combines complex data analysis with compelling human stories, and is a skilled videographer and photographer as well as a writer. 

Her reporting exposed how French oil giant TotalEnergies continued to fund Mozambican troops guarding Africa’s biggest gas infrastructure, despite knowing they were implicated in looting, rape and killings.

After obtaining internal company documents detailing anonymised accounts of suspected

abuses, she spent months identifying victims, before travelling to Mozambique and securing interviews with victims and their families. The story was published with France’s biggest newspaper, LeMonde, picked up more widely, and featured in parliamentary debates in France and the Netherlands.

Her work on ‘shadow crews’, revealing how companies in the EU and Ukraine were manning ‘dark fleet’ tankers carrying sanctioned Russian oil, combines data work, satellite tracking and interviews with sailors. It is part of a wider project – a collaboration of 13 newsrooms and more than 40 journalists – that won the Daphne Caruana Galizia prize for journalism.

Another story exposed how Amazon, Microsoft and Google are building data centres that are

consuming vast amounts of water in some of the world’s most arid regions. The story was picked up and followed worldwide.

Judges’ comments: “Costanza's work demonstrates serious investigative chops with a very high level of originality, creativity and the ability to turn complex issues into highly readable stories.”