By Stephan Faris

Why not begin with a bit about me?

I’ve been writing about the environment and the developing world since I quit my job at a New Jersey newspaper in 2001 and moved to Lagos, Nigeria.

I spent a year there, living in a cheap, government run hostel, where I shared my room with a charismatic, cracker-stealing rat and – on at least one occasion when I was away on a trip – with a prostitute and her client(s). I often took refuge on my friends’ couches.

One of my first stories was on the rollout of cell phones in a country where up until then only the rich and well-connected could afford a landline. For the first couple of months I did all my reporting by hopping on a motorcycle taxi and heading to where I needed to go, a formation that gave me a strong preference for face-to-face interviews.

When a story I wrote for Time Magazine, on corruption in the media, resulted in weeks of newspaper coverage, a government investigation, the near-firing of the information minister, it was time to move on.

I’ve since lived in some of the best cities in the world. From Istanbul, I covered the run-up to the war in Iraq and the subsequent invasion. Nairobi served me as a base to bounce around large parts Africa, from Liberia to Somalia, from Sudan to Zimbabwe. After my son was born in 2004, I followed my wife to Beijing. We now live in Rome, having just returned from a year in northern California.

It was while visiting the refugee camps just outside of Darfur that I first became interested in climate change. The conflict was clearly rooted in the environment. And when I later learned that computer models had traced the origins of the drought there to same oceanic warming that some were blaming for stronger hurricanes off the coast of New Orleans, I started to wonder how else the emissions from our cars, power plants and factories were shaping our world.

The result was a book, Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley, which has just been released in paperback.

You can follow me here, and see more of my work at www.stephanfaris.com