Biography

Issam Ahmed is a “Future of the Planet” correspondent for Agence France-Presse, a role spanning both reporting and coordinating climate change, environmental, and nature coverage across North America.

He has previously served as AFP’s English-language US health, science and environment reporter and as the agency’s Pakistan and Afghanistan correspondent, with editing postings in Washington and Hong Kong.

Prior to AFP, he was the Christian Science Monitor‘s Pakistan correspondent during the height of the Taliban insurgency, and wrote for Dawn, Pakistan’s paper of record.

A longtime wire journalist, he is drawn to breaking news as much as to short-form, human-centered features that tell important stories concisely and in context. Recent work includes a reportage on a rural Georgia community bearing the toll of forever-chemical contamination in its water supply, and a dispatch from off the New England coast accompanying marine biologists documenting the last of the endangered North Atlantic right whales.