About

I am a freelance journalist, film maker and campaign communication consultant with 20 years experience on the energy transition. 

I came to London, from Milan, in 1996 for an MSc in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at the London School of Economics. I wrote my thesis on geopolitics of oil and gas in the post Soviet world, which was later published in a book about the Caspian Sea. I then worked as a reporter for business publishers such as Euromoney Institutional Investor, Petroleum Argus and Dow Jones Newswires, specialising for a  few years in natural gas markets.

In 2001, I covered my first UN COP climate conference, but paradoxically spent most of my time chasing OPEC ministers to ask them about oil production quotas as that’s what “the markets” were demanding of a business writer.

Thanks to a supportive editor, I did manage to write some of the earliest articles on the energy market implications of climate change for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. But there weren’t many options, as a business journalist, to spend more time covering climate change issues in depth: the press on the whole was largely neglecting – and often minimising – what I already thought back then should have been a regular front page story. Or at least given as much space as the oil and gas producer perspective.

So I branched out to the non profit, think tank and intergovernmental sector to see what I could do. 

That led me to manage a wide range of projects: from devising and kick starting, from 2002 onwards, the first pan-European campaigns on energy efficiency legislation across the EU, some of which are still going today, to devising a comprehensive research programme for The Big Ask, which informed the Stern Review and the 2008 UK Climate Change Act; from writing media briefings about the business implications of the Paris Agreement, to interviewing former ministers and EU Commissioners for a report on the energy transition I edited for Chatham House. 

I now advise organisations in the non profit and government sectors in a wide range of ways.

I continue writing articles when I can , but my main journalistic effort has slightly shifted to directing and producing short films and videos.

Between January 2017 and July 2022 I have been a senior adviser and later member of the board of directors of the3million, the organisation representing EU nationals in the UK. I had a key role in setting up the organisation’s advocacy work in 2017, which led to high level access to EU institutions and UK decision makers. I’ve also recently been elected to represent Italians in England and Wales in the Committee of Italians Abroad (Comites) – London. 

I am bilingual English-Italian and I also speak Spanish, French and some Russian. I have work and living experience in multiple countries and continents. 

For more information and my daily rates, please contact me at mail [AT] germanacanzi.eu