Bud is an environmental journalist and journalism educator in the Washington, D.C./Virginia area. He started his environmental journalism career in 1974 as Managing Editor of The Bureau of National Affairs’ (BNA) Environment Reporter. In 1982, after serving for three years as Assistant Director of the U.S. Congress’s National Commission on Air Quality, under the Clean Air Act, he founded and edited The Environmental Forum, a monthly policy magazine.
In 1988 Bud established the Environmental Health Center as an environmental communications division of a large nonprofit organization, and he that year founded Environment Writer, a monthly newsletter specifically for reporters and editors covering natural resources and environmental issues.
A co-founder of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) in 1989, he has authored/co-authored two books on environmental regulatory issues and has authored more than 1,000 bylined articles on environmental and journalism issues. He has served as a regular environmental analyst for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.” He also founded and managed the foundation-funded Central European Environmental Journalism Program.
Bud was Advisory Editor for the Oxford University Second Edition of Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather (2007); and an adviser to the 2007/2008 United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report, Climate Change and Human Development. He for several years administered the Jury for the Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment (2006-2012), which at $75,000 was the richest prize in journalism. George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communications in 2009 named Ward its “Climate Change Communicator of the Year.” In recent years he has conducted a series of full-day workshops for journalists, editors, and broadcast meteorologists on issues related to journalism and climate change science.
A member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2010 and is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS). He earned bachelors and masters degrees in journalism and in mass communications from Penn State University.