Philip Jacobson is a senior editor on Mongabay’s Southeast Asia desk, based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and a 2023-24 fellow with the inaugural cohort of the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.
Since joining Mongabay in 2015, he has covered a variety of issues pertaining to forests, oceans, mining, plantations, and wildlife, especially in Indonesia. His latest investigation uncovered a massive illegal shark finning operation across the fleet of a major Chinese tuna fishing company; the article prompted the U.S. Treasury Department to issue sanctions against the firm, its owner and all of its vessels, and preceded a ban on the use of certain types of shark fishing gear in much of the Pacific Ocean.
From 2017 to 2018, he co-authored the “Indonesia for Sale” series, about Indonesian politicians using shell companies as vehicles for selling palm oil plantation permits to major corporations, with colleagues from The Gecko Project; he has also collaborated on in-depth investigations with BBC News, Al Jazeera’s 101 East program, Indonesia’s Tempo magazine, Malaysiakini, the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism, the Environmental Reporting Collective, and more. His stories also include exposés of how Asia Pulp & Paper disguised its ownership of a wood plantation clearing rainforest in violation of its zero-deforestation commitment and how a politician in Borneo gerrymandered his district in order to facilitate land grabbing for palm oil.
His work has been recognized by the TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting, SOPA Awards, SEJ Awards, Online Journalism Awards, Fetisov Journalism Awards, and Longform.org, among others. After being imprisoned in Indonesian Borneo in 2020, he received the Pantau Foundation’s Oktovianus Pogau Award for Courage in Journalism.
