Yale Climate Connections

About Yale Climate Connections

Yale Climate Connections is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan news service based in New Haven, Connecticut, that helps audiences understand climate change and what can be done about it. Produced by the Yale Center for Environmental Communication at the Yale School of the Environment, it publishes original reporting, commentary, and analysis online and produces a daily 90-second radio program broadcast on hundreds of stations nationwide. Staffed by professional journalists and radio producers, the service reaches millions of U.S. residents each year through its website, its radio carriage, and republication by partner outlets. Its official website is yaleclimateconnections.org.

Origins at Yale

Yale Climate Connections grew out of Yale's pioneering work in climate change communication. It is an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication, succeeding earlier Yale efforts including the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, a resource that for years helped journalists cover climate science. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, led by research scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, conducts scientific research on public climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior at global, national, and local scales, and its insights are used by hundreds of news organizations including CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and The Guardian. Yale Climate Connections serves as the newsroom arm of this ecosystem, translating research and reporting into daily journalism for the public.

The Daily 90-Second Radio Program

The service's flagship product is a daily 90-second radio program that debuted in 2014 on more than three dozen stations across the United States and Canada, with a full-year commitment for more than 200 episodes in its first season. The series is edited by Bud Ward, a veteran environmental journalist and editor of the Yale Climate Connections website, and hosted by Anthony Leiserowitz, a senior research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Each episode is reported by a team of veteran freelance journalists. The program has since grown substantially: it is now broadcast each day on hundreds of radio stations and more than 500 frequencies nationwide, making it one of the most widely carried climate-focused radio features in the country.

What the Stories Cover

Yale Climate Connections aims to help citizens and institutions understand how the changing climate is already affecting their lives, and to help individuals, corporations, media organizations, nonprofits, government agencies, academics, artists, and others learn from one another about constructive solutions people are undertaking to reduce climate-related risks and wasteful energy practices. Its stories connect the dots between climate change and energy, extreme weather, public health, food and water, jobs and the economy, national security, the creative arts, and religious and moral values, among other themes. Early episodes included a report on how the Georgia Sierra Club and the Atlanta Tea Party worked together to promote rooftop solar systems, and a story about artists making the invisible effects of climate change visible to the wider public — a solutions-oriented approach that has remained the service's hallmark.

A Small but Mighty Newsroom

The organization describes itself as a small but mighty news service. It is staffed by professional editors, journalists, and radio producers and operates with a compact team of roughly 20 people. Its editor-in-chief is Sara Peach, an experienced science and environment journalist. The newsroom produces original daily reporting alongside the radio program, with stories written to be accessible to general audiences while grounded in current climate science. Despite its size, the service's output reaches millions of U.S. residents each year, a reach made possible by its radio distribution network and by republication of its stories by other media outlets.

Independent and Nonpartisan

Yale Climate Connections is independent and nonpartisan. Its journalists cover climate change as a scientific and civic story rather than as a partisan battleground, focusing on observed impacts, documented risks, and the responses of communities, businesses, and governments. The service's nonpartisan positioning reflects its academic home: it is produced by a university research center whose credibility depends on the integrity of its science and the fairness of its reporting. That stance has allowed its radio program to air on stations across the political and geographic spectrum, carrying climate stories into markets where the topic is rarely covered.

Reach Through Radio and Republication

Distribution is central to the service's model. The daily radio program's carriage on hundreds of stations gives it a broadcast footprint far larger than its newsroom size would suggest, delivering 90-second climate stories to commuters and listeners who might never seek out environmental news. Online, its articles are picked up and republished by other outlets — it maintains an author presence on sites such as EcoWatch — extending the life of each story beyond its own website. The service also engages a large and growing social media audience, using short-form video and graphics to translate its reporting for digital platforms.

Use in Education

Yale Climate Connections' reporting is widely used as a teaching resource. Educators have built classroom materials around its stories, which are written at a level accessible to students while remaining anchored in evidence. Lesson plans aligned to Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core English standards use its articles, videos, and daily radio stories to help students analyze climate change stories, construct evidence-based arguments, and practice communicating scientific information. The service's plain-language, solutions-oriented approach makes it particularly useful for teachers introducing climate topics to students encountering them for the first time.

Part of Yale's Communication Ecosystem

Yale Climate Connections sits within a broader Yale infrastructure devoted to understanding and improving climate communication. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication conducts ongoing opinion polling of the American public on climate — work often compared to that of the Pew Research Center — and produces the Yale Climate Opinion Maps, interactive maps showing climate beliefs, risk perception, and policy support at the state and local level, developed with the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication. Among its most influential research products is "Global Warming's Six Americas," a long-running audience-segmentation study that divides the American public into six groups — Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive — based on their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors regarding climate change. The segmentation has shaped how communicators, campaigners, and journalists think about reaching different audiences, underscoring the program's cardinal rule that there is no single "public" but many publics, each requiring a different approach. The program also offers guidance on how activists and everyday people can communicate more effectively about climate change. The news service draws on this research environment, giving its journalism a depth of audience insight few newsrooms possess.

Why It Matters

Local news outlets have lost much of the specialist expertise needed to cover a technical, slow-moving story like climate change, and national coverage often treats it as an abstract policy debate. Yale Climate Connections fills the gap with daily, concrete, human-scale stories about how warming is changing American life — and what people are doing about it. Its 90-second format respects the constraints of broadcast radio while delivering verified, professionally reported journalism to audiences that commercial climate coverage struggles to reach. As an independent nonprofit newsroom inside one of the world's leading climate-communication research centers, it represents a distinctive model: journalism informed by science, distributed through public radio, and built to help a divided public find common ground in facts.