About
Despite being one of the defining challenges of our time, coverage of the climate crisis and its solutions are overshadowed by the outrage cycle and misinformation. Climate River equips our audience with the latest and most credible news on the crisis. This is done by aggregating articles from leading outlets, improving headlines for accuracy, and ranking for trust and timeliness.
If you have feedback or suggestions, please email me at [email protected]
Created by Dylan Wahbe.
How it works
Climate River monitors 40+ trusted outlets via RSS feeds and supplements them with web searches to catch stories that may not appear in feeds. Incoming articles are grouped into story clusters using semantic similarity — so if five outlets cover the same event, they appear together as one story. Headlines are rewritten for clarity, and stories are ranked based on source credibility, timeliness, and how many outlets are covering them.
Stories are organized into six categories: government policy, activism, business, climate impacts, clean technology, and research.
Built with Next.js, Tailwind, and Postgres. Code available on GitHub. Inspired by Techmeme.
Frequently asked questions
- What is Climate River?
- Climate River is a climate news aggregator that monitors 40+ trusted outlets via RSS feeds and web searches, then organizes their reporting by story. Instead of visiting dozens of sites, you get a single ranked feed of the most important climate news, updated continuously throughout the day.
- How often is Climate River updated?
- New articles are ingested multiple times per day via RSS feeds and web searches. Stories are re-ranked and clustered continuously, so the homepage always reflects the latest developments.
- How are stories ranked?
- Stories are ranked using a combination of source credibility, timeliness, and coverage breadth. Articles that appear across multiple trusted outlets are weighted higher, surfacing stories with the broadest editorial consensus.
- Why are some headlines rewritten?
- Headlines are rewritten for clarity and accuracy using AI, following the Techmeme style. The goal is to describe the news event plainly rather than use clickbait. Original sources are always linked and clearly attributed.
- How is the Weekly Leaderboard calculated?
- The Weekly Leaderboard ranks publications by story impact over a rolling 7-day window. When an outlet is the first to cover a story (a 'lead'), it earns points equal to the number of articles across all outlets that end up covering that same story. Breaking a story that 10 outlets pick up is worth more than breaking one only you cover. Rankings update continuously throughout the day.
- How can I get climate news updates?
- You can subscribe to the Climate River RSS feed at climateriver.org/feed.xml using any feed reader. The feed includes the top 30 stories, updated every 5 minutes.