6-Hour Podcast on Climate at Swedish Radio

Since 2022, she has been asking the same question to people she has met, primarily in her work as a reporter at Swedish public radio. Now the project has resulted in a six-hour long podcast about the climate.

“What question would you ask in a survey about the climate crisis?” That question has been posed by Anna-Karin Ivarsson, culture reporter at Sveriges Radio, to more than 200 people over four years.

– I actually hope to make a certain international impact. The climate crisis is, after all, a :censored:6:cdd6bbaa89: issue. But this is a difficult geopolitical time to reach out. But “let’s give it a try”, “dare to be great” and “never be boring,” as American radio guru Valerie Geller often says, she tells Journalisten.

Among those who respond are researchers, artists, and musicians but also “ordinary wage-earners” and students.

The idea to use paid working hours in public service to ask questions about the so-called climate crisis came to Ivarsson while working as a climate reporter for Vetenskapsradion Klotet in 2022. There, she realized she wanted to do something long-form that no one had done before—and at the same time, find new ways to talk about the climate crisis.

Depth and Breadth

When Ivarsson and the SR research department looked for long audio surveys, they found none and concluded it was needed.

– Hearing me ask the same question to all the researchers and experts I met at work would become tedious, so I realized that these people, with their deep knowledge, must surely have questions of their own. And they did.

The first to be asked was Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian. The responses since then, she thinks, have been very good, with both depth and breadth. Her favorite answer came from the American artist Patti Smith.