Rebecca Hersher
Rebecca Hersher (she/her) is a reporter on NPR's Climate Desk, where she reports on climate science, weather disasters, infrastructure and how humans are adapting to a hotter world.
Since coming to NPR in 2011, she has covered the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, embedded with the Afghan army after the American combat mission ended and reported on floods, heat waves and hurricanes in the U.S. and around the world.
Hersher was part of the NPR team that won the Kavli Science Journalism Award for the series “Beyond the Poles: The far-reaching dangers of melting ice,” as well as a Peabody award and an Edward R. Murrow award for coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Her 2019 coverage of climate-driven flash floods also won an Edward R. Murrow award, and she was part of a team that was honored with a 2020 Society of News Design award for multimedia storytelling. She was a finalist for the Daniel Schorr prize, a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting fellow and an NPR Above the Fray fellow, investigating the causes of the suicide epidemic in Greenland.
Before coming to the Climate Desk, Hersher worked for NPR's Science Desk, was a producer on Weekend All Things Considered and covered biomedical news for Nature Medicine. [Copyright 2025 NPR]
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Some of the country's highest home insurance prices are in the central U.S., a region generally considered to be protected from climate-driven disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. -
Home insurance is getting less affordable, and less available, as insurers raise prices and pull back from areas with extreme weather. That's forcing families across the country to make tough choices. -
Under President Trump, the U.S. has taken steps to roll back climate policies. Here are six significant changes. -
The banned words list applies to all work done at the largest federal funder of clean energy technology. -
The government's colossal failure to respond after Hurricane Katrina led to major reforms at the nation's top disaster agency. Now, the Trump administration has reversed some of those changes. -
Funding for FEMA's disaster survivor hotline lapsed the day after the Texas floods, federal records show. It took DHS Secretary Kristi Noem five days to approve more money. -
The Trump administration has asked NASA staffers to draw up plans to end at least two satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to current and former NASA employees. -
About a month after announcing that it would stop sharing data that hurricane forecasters and scientists rely on, the Navy now says it will continue distributing it. -
Many people in the United States receive little or no information about flood risk when they move into a new home or apartment. Here's how you can learn about your flood risk. -
In the wake of the deadly flash floods in Texas, state leaders are exploring whether to install more flood warning sirens. Such sirens can save lives if they're part of a larger warning system.
