The One-Minute Smarties Of Climate Reporting

Take climate journalism, reduce it to the essentials, and record it using professional production methods. Then break it into small pills and take daily. That's the formula for Yale Climate Connections.

Forget about long conversations and in-depth investigations. The model here is different. These are the Smarties of climate podcasting. Yale Climate Connections' episodes are one to two minutes long, featuring interesting and relevant stories, often outside the news cycle. They are published on weekdays.

But short doesn't mean easy. Each iteration of the series is carefully produced, using all the elements of good radio and featuring interviews and on-the-ground reporting. The topics here are really varied and go from scientific findings to impact mitigation, and from tech advances to social initiatives. 

However, I miss hearing a bit more about the causes of the problem (a usual gap in climate reporting). It is also quite focused on US stories, but most of them are not too local and refer to global issues, so I still found them relevant.

Some of my favorite snippets from these last couple of months:

• One woman's quest to improve climate education in Mississippi
• Rising temperatures could tip the balance of power in an underwater drama
• How the World Evangelical Alliance engages climate skeptics

Climate Connections is an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication. Yale University also hosts YaleEnvironment 360, another world-class climate reporting initiative in written form, which you can check out here.