Environmental Science Podcasts

Resources Radio is the clearest of the policy explainers. In Climate-Related Risks in the Financial Sector, with Kevin Stiroh, the former Federal Reserve official describes an exercise in which banks stressed their real estate loans twice, once assuming insurance coverage and once assuming none. The host also presses on the data gaps the banks reported. In Maximizing Minerals at Home, with Beia Spiller, the guest wonders whether the threat of Chinese control over critical minerals may be overblown relative to the scale of the policy response. A show that questions its own premise has earned some trust.

The ClimateTech Podcast, from the UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre, brings similar care to developing countries. Clean Cooking - Financing, Policy, and Innovation for Last Mile Impact explains that black carbon stays in the atmosphere for only days or weeks, so cutting it brings quick benefits for both climate and health. Non Economic Loss and Damage - Measuring Climate Change Impacts turns to losses that cannot be priced. One guest describes a 2023 wildfire that destroyed an unbacked archive of recorded traditional knowledge: "half of our knowledge repository lost."

For a business lens, the Danish BusinessReview Update panel ESG-Panelet: CO2’en skal væk fra atmosfæren asks openly whether carbon capture can develop on market conditions alone. The Social Sciences page goes further into the economics and politics behind these questions.

How To Protect The Ocean, hosted by Andrew Lewin, suits ocean-curious listeners. In The Hidden Ocean World Most of Us Will Never See, guests explain seamounts, which are underwater extinct volcanoes. Currents striking them lift nutrient-rich water, and corals and sponges build up around them. The guests also admit that identifying a deep-sea specimen can take around five years. In The Ocean Is in Trouble, So Why Is This Report Hopeful?, Lewin points to North Atlantic cod rebuilding over 30 years. He calls Canada's expanding cod fisheries "a big mistake in my opinion," clearly marking the view as his own.

Terra Informa's Revisiting: Pacific Salmon the Sequel: Salmon Health & Aquaculture is a model of careful hedging. With guest Andrew Bateman, it explains that much of the evidence linking salmon farms to population declines comes from population models. Researchers count spawning fish, predict how many should return, and find returns depressed on average where salmon farming is heavy. The Earth Sciences and Biology pages pick up from here.

For something stranger, Białkowski Interia zielona's Polish-language Czy liście mogą produkować prąd? hears Professor Joanna Karg of the University of Warsaw describe placing a photosynthetic protein on an electrode. The conversation also acknowledges an efficiency disadvantage compared with photovoltaic panels.

Plastics produce the sharpest disagreements, and shows handle them very differently. DW reporter Neil King gave On The Green Fence a plastics series. Early in Why don't we use more bioplastics? he warns that "the term bio can be very misleading here." Can we recycle our way out of the plastic crisis? sets an industry case for chemical recycling against a critic's fear that new plants will take clean, well-sorted plastic away from mechanical recycling.

You're A Natural stages two-host debates around its own written reports. When Recycling Leaves the Country moves from the paperwork of UK waste exports to the 2018 Greenpeace finding of London council recycling bags at illegal dump sites in Malaysia. The First Case Was 1979 is a sharp lesson in uncertainty. One host argues that the timeline linking flame retardants to feline hyperthyroidism demands action. The other keeps returning to small samples and a finding that did not reach statistical significance. The Chemistry page is a natural next stop.

Awakening's #416 Awakening to the Plastics Truth: Dr. Chris DeArmitt on Science vs. Mythology offers a contrary view. DeArmitt argues that plastics degrade like other carbon-based materials and dismisses some recent Lancet studies as fiction. These are his contested positions. Hear them as one scientist's argument, not a verdict.

Down the drain, Abwassertalk's German-language #136 - Road to IFAT - Stoffströme und Stoffstromtrennung im Abwasserbereich - Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Barjenbruch explains that urine carries roughly 70-80% of our nitrogen. Near the end, Barjenbruch asks for technologies that can be checked: "Not that the inventor says he can do everything but that it is verifiable."

Farming shows have some of the most practical conversations in the field. In The Composter Podcast's Financing the Future of Compost with Jorge Montezuma and Paula Luu, host Jayne Merner and her guests talk loans and business plans. One guest calls composting "the most flexible and adaptable technology out there," compared with digestate that is hard to spread in wet or freezing weather.

CLEAR Conversations' The True Cost of GMOs in Crops and Animal Agriculture hears a UC Davis geneticist argue two points. First, Bt crops sharply reduced insecticide use. Second, public unease is often about corporate control of the food supply rather than the genetics itself.

Planet Pulse Pacific's Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop - Agriculture & Climate Change presents a bolder claim. The guest argues that consistent carbon accounting shows agriculture to be the leading cause of climate change, and says that varying his data by 15 to 20% does not change that conclusion. Treat it as his research case, open to challenge.

Eat This Podcast's A Fresh Look at Domestication adds historical depth: Robert Spengler argues that domestication was largely unintentional. The Life Sciences page goes further into this territory.

Some environmental stories need a place to unfold. The California Report Magazine's Indigenous Communities Reclaim Ancestral Lands and Waters joins a mushroom hunt led by the Potter Valley tribe on a 48-acre property near Fort Bragg. It then plays a documentary clip of Indigenous teenagers paddling the Klamath after four dams were removed in 2024. These Workers Help Keep Food Flowing Through the Golden State follows divers cleaning fish screens in murky canal water, where, as one puts it, "everything's by feel."

Costing the Earth's Steve Backshall Goes Off Grid, from 2023, is a candid domestic experiment. A thermal camera revealed unsealed insulation that looked like steam from a kettle, and one speaker concludes, "The insulation is everything." The broader Science page maps the rest of the territory.