Justin Rowlatt

Rowlatt is currently a foreign correspondent, as the BBC's lead reporter for the entire South Asia region. He took up the post in Delhi for two years, starting February 2015. One of his first assignments was the April 2015 Nepal earthquake. That summer he went undercover to Thalsevana, a holiday resort taken over by the Sri Lankan military during the civil war.

Rowlatt is married to BBC World Service producer Bee Rowlatt and they have four children. The family appears in the year-long filming of Ethical Man, and "Ethical Wife" contributed independently to the series by investigating his oil company holdings. She has written of their relationship and family life in her book Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad. The couple jointly presented the 2013 documentary Make Me a German.

Much of Rowlatt's career has focussed on current affairs and business and economic reporting. He was part of the original reporting team for BBC One's popular prime time factual programme, The One Show, "reporting on current affairs with flair". He was a relief presenter for BBC Breakfast in 2010 and for BBC Radio 4's PM programme in 2014. During his time as a Newsnight correspondent he caused a minor scandal when the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, complained about his dress sense.

Rowlatt has presented a number of prime time television series including The Trouble with Working Women with Sophie Raworth. The May 2009 programme caused controversy when at management consultancy Accenture he suggested a female-heavy office must have been full of secretaries. In 2011 he presented The Chinese Are Coming, a pair of documentaries looking at the growing influence of China in Africa and in the Americas. In 2011 he co-presented, with fellow journalist Anita Rani, the two-part documentary travelogue India on Four Wheels, a road trip around India sampling the changes and problems the growing car usage has brought to the country in the last two decades (see Transport in India#Automobiles). The format proved successful, and the pair collaborated on two two-part follow-ups, first China on Four Wheels, which aired in September 2012, (see Transport in China#Motor vehicles) and then Russia on Four Wheels (see Transport in Russia#Roads and highways), which aired in January 2014. Rowlatt and Rani had a "jokey, human interest, quick-in-and-out approach"

In 2008 Rowlatt became the first television journalist to interview a serving MI6 agent; the intelligence service was seeking to broaden its recruitment. Rowlatt says of his interviewing technique, "It wasn’t like a Paxman interview but I was trying to get under his skin a bit and understand what it was like to do his job." Under the hot camera lights, the agent's false moustache slipped from his lip. His technique evidently annoyed Sir Alan Sugar, the entrepreneur at the centre of The Apprentice, when Today arranged a tenth anniversary interview. Rowlatt asked him about bullying; Sugar objected, called him a "crap reporter", and walked out.

The strand became popular, with Rowlatt reporting on global warming and environment issues across all BBC outlets. Panorama broadcast an Ethical Man special "Go Green or Else". In 2007 Rowlatt presented an hour-long prime-time programme exploring how the United States is engaging with the climate issue for BBC Two's This World, titled "Can Obama Save the Planet?".

Justin Rowlatt became widely known in Britain when in 2006 he became Newsnight's "Ethical Man". On Rowlatt's first day at the programme, Peter Barron, the editor, challenged him and his family to spend a year trying to reduce their impact on the environment. It made him an "accidental green hero", according to The Guardian. In 2003, that paper had commissioned Leo Hickman to spend a year with his young family on a similar project, which resulted in a book entitled Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying To Live Ethically. Hickman defined "ethical living" as "shorthand for seeing whether you can make changes to your lifestyle that lead to a more positive impact on the people and environment around you" and Rowlatt, who acknowledges his debt to Hickman (and to Lucy Siegle, author of Green Living in the Urban Jungle), continued in this vein, focusing on environmental impact, especially his carbon footprint (rather than, say, labour rights). One of the "Ethical Man" advisors was Tim Jackson, the environmental economist, described as a "carbon guru"

During his time on Channel 4 News, he was a passenger on the train involved in the Hatfield rail crash in 2000, reporting that he "watched the carriages skid and whip around on the gravel besides the track".

Justin Rowlatt (born June 1966) is a British journalist, news reporter and television presenter. In February 2015 he became the BBC's South Asia Correspondent, based in Delhi. In June 2019 he became the BBC's Chief Environment correspondent.

Rowlatt was born in London in 1966 and was educated at Hampstead Comprehensive in Cricklewood, and then at Mansfield College, Oxford University.

Rowlatt's paternal great-grandfather, Sir Sidney Rowlatt, was a prominent judge on the King's Bench Division of the High Court of England and Wales. In 1918, he headed the controversial Rowlatt Committee to evaluate terrorism and seditious movements in British India, and drafted the repressive Rowlatt Act, which authorised stricter press censorship and the arrest and indefinite detention of suspects without due process. The passage of the Act in March 1919 ignited protests across the subcontinent and led directly to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar Massacre); it has been cited as a major factor in stimulating and expanding the Indian independence movement. As the South Asia correspondent for the BBC, Rowlatt acknowledged his family connection in August 2017. In a BBC article examining the post-1947 India-British relationship, he said he had initially been worried his surname would prove a handicap during his posting in India, but that it had not, as the nation had largely moved on.

His maternal grandfather, Theo Ionides, was born in 1900 and, although eager to participate in World War I, just missed action. He studied engineering at Oxford University, and went to India to work with Ralli Brothers until it folded in the 1930s. When World War II started, he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He was handpicked by Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series, to join No. 30 Commando, a special intelligence unit tasked to move ahead of advancing Allied forces. His unit crossed the Channel a few days after D-Day; Ionides was killed by a German bomb that night. His daughter Penelope, Rowlatt's mother, was a young child then, and so grew up without a father.