Caleigh Wells

Climate reporter

Greater Los Angeles

Healthy Communities Beat reporter, covering climate, public health and the environment

Caleigh Wells

Climate reporter

Greater Los Angeles

Healthy Communities Beat reporter, covering climate, public health and the environment

Featured
The Anti-Dread Climate Podcast
The climate crisis gets more terrifying every year. The impact is undeniable and can feel totally overwhelming. Hope won’t solve it, but neither will hopelessness. A surefire way to manage anxiety and stress over the existential problem threatening our planet is to participate in solutions. So our team is prepared to answer your questions about how you can meaningfully make a difference.
KCRW
Featured
BURNED: A California Newsroom investigation
BURNED, a yearlong investigation from the California Newsroom, reveals how the U.S. Forest Service is struggling to complete the work it knows it must do to keep Californians safe from wildfires. For decades, the agency has developed projects to thin and manage overgrown forests in an effort to reduce wildfire intensity. But those plans routinely stall out, and sometimes are abandoned completely.
NPR, and various member stations nationwide (won national Murrow)
These Los Angeles kids are getting involved in addressing climate change
As the world focuses on how to address climate change, a school in Los Angeles offers a way to get young people involved in addressing the issue.
NPR
With “regenerative” farming, small growers can reap big profits for air and soil
Mollie Engelhart’s Sow a Heart Farm in Fillmore, a town northwest of Los Angeles, doesn’t look anything like the orderly farms next door. Between the avocado trees are messy mixes of peppers, garlic, broccoli and cauliflower. But everything is planted somewhere for a reason.
Marketplace, KCRW
Salton Sea: Environmental disaster, climate change solution
At the shoreline is a sign saying not to touch the toxic water. This is the Salton Sea. And it’s dying. It’s been shrinking for decades.
KCRW
California is taking an unprecedented step to save Joshua trees
California lawmakers have agreed to create a conservation plan to help protect the western Joshua tree, which faces extinction due to climate change.
NPR, KCRW
With water in the West scarce, some tomato farmers look to hydroponics
As the drought in the West drags on, the future of water-loving crops like tomatoes hangs in the balance. Hydroponic farming — the technique Beylik farms with — uses as little as 10% of the water traditional systems use to grow tomatoes and other field crops.
Marketplace
Municipal composting helps food scraps find a second life
On trash pickup day in Los Angeles, the orange peels, carrot tops, egg shells and brown paper bags are no longer carted off to the local landfill. Instead, they go to a compost facility called Recology, 100 miles north to Bakersfield.
Marketplace
Not just an after-school activity: LA teens call for climate action
If you think all climate stories are depressing, check out these young people blazing the trail to a better future. For the month of April, three of LA’s youth climate leaders kept audio diaries for KCRW, recording as they moved from climate protests to classes to testifying before the state legislature and planning for their futures.
KCRW
This million-year-old ecosystem survived 6 ice ages. Now it’s dying
These are the Pebble Plains, a 1 million-year-old ecosystem that has survived six ice ages. It’s perfectly adapted to a changing climate. And now it’s dying off faster than ever recorded.
KCRW
Dangerous Air: As California burns, America breathes toxic smoke
Smoke from western fires, which have burned millions of acres in California alone, is choking vast swaths of the country, an analysis of federal satellite imagery by NPR’s California Newsroom and Stanford University’s Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab found.
Multiple national and local shows/sites across NPR stations. Won regional Murrow
How one company is tackling the tricky — and expensive — task of recycling clothing
Sera works for Homeboy Industries, which rehabilitates and employs formerly incarcerated and gang-affiliated people. She and her coworkers are sorting, selling, sewing, repairing and repurposing clothes.
Marketplace

About

Caleigh Wells

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Caleigh Wells covers the environment, climate, and public health as KCRW’s Healthy Communities Reporter. Since coming to KCRW in 2019, she has covered wildfire, drought, climate legislation, and environmental health and climate anxiety. Her work regularly appears on NPR and on Marketplace. She reported with The California Newsroom on an investigation into the US Forest Service’s fire mitigation work that won a national Murrow award this year. She was a fellow this year in the Solution Journalism Network’s first climate cohort, and was selected to serve on NPR’s high impact climate collaborative. She has spent her career covering climate change for public media, first interning for ideastream in Cleveland and later coming to KCRW from its crosstown rival, LAist.