Motivation & Overview:

The effects of the climate crisis are thought to be extremely far-reaching, from declining economic growth and agricultural productivity to housing displacement and job loss. An important set of consequences are psychological, relating to how climate change can exacerbate anxiety and one’s sense of hopelessness about an uninhabitable future. These psychological impacts are heightened for members of vulnerable and marginalized groups, as well as for those in poor and underdeveloped places that struggle to address climate change.

In “Adolescent psychological health, temporal discounting, and climate distress under increased flood exposure in Bangladesh,” Liza Goldberg and her coauthors examine the psychological well-being of 15 to 18-year-olds in two Bangladeshi cities that have been differentially affected by floods. The authors conduct surveys and focus groups with adolescents in the low-flood-risk capital city of Dhaka and the high-flood-risk city of Barisal. They find that although adolescents in both cities fear the personal impacts of climate change, rates of anxiety and depression are significantly higher in Barisal. In addition, those with anxiety and depression exhibit greater temporal discounting, meaning that short-term consequences are favored over longer-term ones. Discounting is an important — if neglected — consequence because adolescents will emerge as household decision-makers who must plan to adapt to climate change. The article is notable in increasing our knowledge of how floods harm members of an already vulnerable population.

Case Selection and Hypotheses:

Bangladesh is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. This is due to its “deltaic” geography (i.e., its low, flat land, crossed by many rivers) and consequent flood exposure, extreme temperature and humidity, and poor air quality. Barisal — a city of over 500,000 that is roughly 115 kilometers from Dhaka — is highly vulnerable to flooding, as well as being poorer (relative to Dhaka) and limited in its “climate adaptation infrastructure.” Partly for these reasons, rates of migration from Barisal to Dhaka are the highest in Bangladesh. By contrast, Dhaka — the capital city of over 24 million — is less flood-exposed and is slightly wealthier. Respondents in Barisal and Dhaka reported around four floods and one flood per year, respectively.
 

Figure. Study site locations in Bangladesh. Study sites at Dhaka (A) and Barisal (B) are shown in red.
 

The authors hypothesize that Barisal’s greater flood exposure would be associated with more anxiety and depression among its adolescents, and that anxiety and depression would be associated with greater temporal discounting. (In other words, they do not expect that flood exposure would be directly associated with discounting.) In addition, the authors expect that these negative psychological effects would be especially pronounced among poor Bangladeshis, girls, and those with a greater awareness of the climate crisis.

Data and Findings:

The authors surveyed 1200 Bangladeshi adolescents in 24 schools immediately after the flood season, which usually runs from May to September. In addition, 16 focus groups were conducted with around 160 total participants. Adolescents in both cities expressed a high familiarity with climate change. However, and consistent with the authors’ expectations, those in Barisal expressed significantly higher levels of agreement with statements about climate distress. For example 97% of those in Barisal compared to just 68% in Dhaka agreed that “My family’s security will be threatened,” 93% in Barisal and 58% in Dhaka agreed that “The things I most value will be destroyed,” and 98% in Barisal and 67% in Dhaka agreed that “My feelings about climate change negatively affect my daily life.” 
 

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Table 3. Climate distress survey results disaggregated by region.
 

The focus groups corroborated this unequal sense of despair, especially concerning the future and one’s educational and career goals. In Barisal, a boy said, “We expect that we will have to continue withstanding this [flooding] for many years to come,” while a girl said, “I used to want to become a teacher myself, but now I believe I will need to get married immediately after school because my father keeps losing his job during the floods.” By contrast, and because flooding in Dhaka is so infrequent, adolescents did not expect climate change to meaningfully threaten their life trajectories.

In terms of anxiety and depression, 86% of those in Barisal reported anxiety symptoms, compared to 71% in Dhaka, while 98% in Barisal and 88% in Dhaka reported depressive symptoms. After adjusting for factors like sex, wealth, and climate change awareness, the odds of being anxious and depressed in Barisal were nearly twice as high and more than 3.5 times as high, respectively. Across both cities, females were more than 1.75 times as likely to experience anxiety. And the odds of being depressed were over 1.85 times as high for those with a greater awareness of climate change.

Girls in the Barisal focus groups revealed that flooding was linked to domestic violence. Fathers facing financial insecurity were reported to engage in violence against their mothers as a consequence of this stress. As one girl put it, “The floods keep getting worse and worse. So, I may experience even more violence than my mother does.” By contrast, few girls in Dhaka expressed worsening family dynamics, and none reported domestic violence owing to flooding. Adolescents in Dhaka believed that floods in their region were simply too fleeting to result in such abuse.

Finally, only 7% and 6% of adolescents in Barisal and Dhaka showed signs of temporal discounting. However, the odds of discounting were twice as high for those with anxiety and almost 2.5 times as high for those with depression. The authors find some evidence of discounting in the focus groups, but no meaningful differences across cities. This absence may be due to discounting behaviors emerging around adulthood, which is older than the adolescent study population. Taken together, the authors’ findings imply that mental health support will be essential for those affected by climate change — especially in impoverished areas — to help them manage stress and to improve their ability to plan for the future.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

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Following his keynote remarks, Khalil joined a panel discussion with William Dobson, the coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and a veteran in international reporting, and Elora Shehabuddin, a professor of gender and women's studies and the director of the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley. James Hamilton, Stanford University’s vice provost for undergraduate education, the Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Journalism Program, chaired the discussion. Both Dobson and Hamilton also serve on the judging committee for the Shorenstein Award.

The Shorenstein Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, recognizes outstanding journalists and news outlets whose work has deepened the understanding of Asia while advancing the values of a free press.
 

Bearing Witness 

Khalil opened his remarks by sharing a photograph of himself listening to a Bangladeshi woman whose son had been abducted by the Rapid Action Battalion, the country’s elite counterterrorism force that has been accused of serious human rights violations and abuse of power. For Khalil, the image encapsulates the animating question at the heart of Netra News: What does it truly mean to comfort the afflicted?

Investigative journalists, he argued, are first and foremost witnesses. Their work requires listening and documenting, for as long as it takes. He described an investigation that started with a phone call from a day laborer in Malaysia, who recounted his experience being abducted in Dhaka and held in a secret site by a plainclothed squad. Khalil kept calling back with questions, continuing the conversation over months. The source shared precise recollections that helped Netra News map a clandestine detention facility in the heart of the Bangladeshi capital. The investigation, "Secret Prisoners of Dhaka," published in 2023, shed light on hidden abuses and was shortlisted for the Global Shining Light Award for investigative journalism in developing countries. 

Khalil described other Netra News investigations that have sought to expose high-level crimes. “Body Count” combined data journalism and fieldwork to analyze more than a decade of alleged extrajudicial killings and acts of torture by Bangladeshi security forces. The patterns revealed which agencies were involved, geographic concentration, and spikes in killings during election cycles, all underscoring a systematic practice. For this work, the newsroom won a 2024 Sigma Award for Data Journalism.

Bearing witness, Khalil noted, means that public interest journalism must listen not only to the afflicted, but also to the perpetrators of horrible crimes. In another project, collaborating with German TV broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Netra News interviewed former Rapid Action Battalion commanders on camera about how extrajudicial killings were carried out. The investigation, "Inside the Death Squad," was the first to provide evidence of targeted killings and torture by the RAB, and was recognized with a 2024 Human Rights Press Award for documentary video.

Another joint investigation with DW exposed a pattern of deploying RAB members implicated in torture and killings to serve as United Nations peacekeepers. The revelations were cited by governments and lawmakers, and intensified scrutiny of peacekeeping vetting practices. 

“This is accountability journalism at its purest: reporting that not only informs, but also confronts power and demands justice, said Hamilton in his remarks before the award presentation.

Khalil situated this kind of reportage within a normative framework of journalism that defends democracy and human rights, for which he outlined four roles: monitorial (watching and warning), facilitative (bringing opposing segments of society together), radical (challenging institutions in the name of rights and freedoms), and collaborative (engaging with power when appropriate). First and foremost, this kind of journalism serves the public interest.

An Experiment in Exile

Those commitments guided Netra News from its inception. Khalii established the outlet in 2019 in Sweden, where he had lived in exile since 2008, seeking refuge following his detention and torture by the Bangladeshi military intelligence agency. As he set up the newsroom in exile with colleagues, he made a deliberate choice: rather than defending democratic norms from afar, they would “cover Bangladesh as if it were a democracy, like Sweden or the United States, and report accordingly.”

That meant reporting with no self-censorship or fear. Due to security risks to staff in-country, Netra News adopted the discipline of an intelligence operation, eschewing daily news coverage and opinions to concentrate instead on meticulously vetted investigations. With its reporters distributed across multiple countries and some working undercover in Bangladesh, the newsroom combined offshore editorial independence with on-the-ground reporting, publishing its investigations in both Bangla and English. This approach uniquely positioned the newsroom to cover the July 2024 uprising in Bangladesh with uncommon access.

Now, a year after mass protests toppled Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian regime, and 18 years after he fled the country, Khalil has returned to open a Netra News bureau in Dhaka. Receiving the Shorenstein Journalism Award on behalf of the outlet at this moment, he said, is both recognition of its impact since its founding and a signal of support to the next generation of journalists carrying its mission forward.
 

Youth-Led Uprising in Context

During the discussion that followed Khalil’s keynote, the panelists considered the prospects for democracy in Bangladesh, the economics of investigative reporting, and the dynamics of youth-led protests in Asia.

Asked how the media landscape in Bangladesh had shifted since the 2024 uprising, Khalil said the media’s muscle memory remains one of censorship and fear. The challenge now is to “unlearn stenography,” that is, the practice of reporting only what those in power say, and build habits of dispassionate public interest journalism that scrutinizes both state and non-state power. That includes the interim government, corporate interests, and majoritarian religious forces.

Investigative journalism is a tough business to monetize and sustain. Khalil explained that Netra News is a nonprofit and that grant funding from the National Endowment for Democracy has made it possible. Long-term independence, however, will require earning monetary support from the people it serves. “The ultimate test is asking the public, ‘Will you pay for this?’”

Turning to Gen Z protest movements that have swept across South Asia, Dobson noted a wave of digitally savvy youth mobilizations pressing entrenched elites for substantive change. “People want real change, not shuffling the same roster of political players.” The youth-led uprisings that swept through Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and, more recently, Nepal, explained Dobson, had not originally set out to topple the established regimes, but to fight deepening inequality and economic disparities. The agendas changed, however, due to the lack of responsiveness from political institutions that have been hollowed out by patronage and corruption.

Shehabuddin underscored the central role women activists played in Bangladesh’s 2024 protests, leading from the front to help topple the authoritarian government, only to find themselves largely absent from decision-making led by the interim government.

The event concluded with questions from the audience about journalism in transitional contexts and under strain amid democratic backsliding. Newsrooms should aim to serve the entirety of society, said Khalil, alluding to the fragmented media landscape in the United States. As for standing up to anti-democratic power, he returned to first principles: the media’s charge is to bear witness, especially when those in power disapprove.

Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) announced today, in the run-up to World Press Freedom Day, that Bangladesh-focused investigative newsroom Netra News is the recipient of the 2025 Shorenstein Journalism Award. Banned in Bangladesh, Netra News is a Sweden-based, independent platform for public interest journalism that publishes reportage, analysis, and debate on Bangladeshi politics and society. The award recognizes the media outlet for its courageous investigations into high-level corruption and human rights abuses in Bangladesh, defending press freedom, and championing the rule of law and democratic values in the country, one of the world’s most difficult places for practicing journalism. APARC will present the Shorenstein Award to Tasneem Khalil, the platform’s founding editor-in-chief, at a ceremony at Stanford University in autumn 2025.

Sponsored by APARC, the annual Shorenstein Award carries a $10,000 cash prize and honors journalists and journalism organizations for advancing a greater understanding of Asia through outstanding reporting on critical issues in the region. Emulating this purpose, Netra News and its team of editors and reporters have published fearless investigations into human rights violations and corruption in Bangladesh, including extrajudicial killings and acts of torture by security forces, deadly custodial abuse by military personnel, an illegal secret prison run by Bangladesh’s notorious military intelligence agency, and state-sponsored cybercrime. 

Bangladesh had experienced political corruption for decades and had long been a dangerous environment for journalists. Between 2001 and 2006 — a time when an interim government supported by the military took over — journalists in the country suffered threats, intimidation, harassment, and torture from law enforcement agencies.

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Investigative reporter Tasneem Khalil experienced the regime’s brutality firsthand. A pioneer of investigative journalism in Bangladesh and author of Jallad: Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia, Khalil had worked for the Bangladeshi English-language Daily Star, consulted Human Rights Watch, and was a news representative for CNN. In 2007, he was arrested and tortured by Bangladesh’s military intelligence agency in response to his reports on human and civil rights violations by state forces. He was released thanks to international pressure and, after several weeks spent in hiding, escaped Bangladesh and took refuge in Sweden.

Over the next decade, press freedom in Bangladesh steadily declined as then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her ruling party, the Awami League, tightened their grip by brutally harassing and silencing opposition voices and independent civil society figures. To stifle peaceful dissent and curb free expression, the government passed draconian laws, such as the 2018 Digital Security Act (DSA), under which journalists and critics of the Awami League were routinely targeted and prosecuted.

Khalil launched Netra News on December 26, 2019, to hold Bangladesh’s government and security forces accountable and defend fundamental freedoms in the country. Within 48 hours of publishing its first exposé on alleged ministerial corruption, its site was blocked in Bangladesh. Since then, Khalil has overseen Netra News’ growth into the country’s premier independent, non-partisan investigative media outlet, combining offshore human rights-centric public interest journalism with on-the-ground reporting. 

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The newsroom's bold coverage, published in English and Bangla, has earned international recognition, including a Sigma Award, a Human Rights Press Award, and a Global Shining Light Award. In summer 2024, as mass student-led protests against Ms. Hasina broke out across Bangladesh and authorities imposed violent crackdowns and internet blackouts, Netra News emerged as a rare source of non-partisan information on the unfolding events. The protests toppled Hasina’s authoritarian government, whose actions may amount to crimes against humanity, according to a recent United Nations report.

“Operating amid severe risks, Netra News has become a vital force for speaking truth to power and defending the rule of law in Bangladesh,” said Stanford sociologist Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and the director of APARC. “Under Tasneem Khalil’s leadership, the newsroom investigations have pushed the boundaries of accountability journalism and innovative storytelling. We are excited to honor Netra News with the 2025 Shorenstein Journalism Award and recognize Mr. Khalil’s fight for human rights and press freedom.”

Presented annually by APARC, the Shorenstein Award honors the legacy of APARC’s benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. The judging committee for the award, which selected Netra News as the 2025 honoree, noted that the newsroom’s work will be crucial as Bangladesh, now led by an interim government headed by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, tries to pursue constitutional reform, safeguard what young people have made possible, and avert a return to authoritarian rule.

The judging committee members are William Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy; Anna Fifield, Asia-Pacific Editor of the Washington Post and recipient of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award; James Hamilton, vice provost for undergraduate education, Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program at Stanford University; Louisa Lim, associate professor, audio-visual journalism culture and communication at the University of Melbourne; and Raju Narisetti, partner and leader of McKinsey Global Publishing, McKinsey & Company.

Twenty-three honorees previously received the Shorenstein award, including most recently Chris Buckley, chief China correspondent for the New York Times; India's premier magazine of long-form journalism The Caravan; NPR’s Emily Feng for her work as Beijing correspondent; Swe Win, editor-in-chief of the independent Burmese news organization Myanmar Now; Tom Wright, co-author of the bestseller Billion Dollar Whale and a veteran Asia reporter; and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, CEO and executive editor of the Philippines-based news organization Rappler.

Information about the 2025 Shorenstein Journalism Award ceremony and panel discussion featuring Mr. Khalil will be forthcoming in the fall quarter.