EcoTicker

Environmental news impact tracker. Aggregates news from 10+ sources, scores severity with AI across health, ecology, and economy dimensions, and displays it in a stock-ticker style dashboard.

Live: ecoticker.sidsinsights.com

What it does

EcoTicker fetches environmental news twice daily from RSS feeds and news APIs, then uses an LLM to:

1. Classify articles into environmental topics (climate policy, wildfires, ocean pollution, etc.)
2. Score each topic 0-100 across three dimensions: ecological impact, health impact, economic impact
3. Track trends over time with sparklines and score history

The result is a real-time severity dashboard for environmental issues — like a stock ticker, but for the planet.

Features

• Severity scoring — AI-powered 0-100 scores with eco/health/econ sub-dimensions
• 4 urgency levels — Breaking (red), Critical (orange), Moderate (yellow), Informational (green)
• Sparklines — 7-day score trends on each topic
• Biggest movers — highlights topics with the largest score swings
• Topic detail pages — full score history, dimension breakdown, source articles
• Dark mode — OS preference detection + manual toggle
• Scoring methodology — transparent rubric at /scoring
• GDPR compliant — no cookies, no tracking, no raw IPs stored

How scoring works

Each topic is scored across three weighted dimensions:

Dimension	Weight	What it measures
Ecological	40%	Ecosystem damage, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction
Health	35%	Air/water quality, disease risk, human safety
Economic	25%	Cleanup costs, job losses, supply chain disruption

The LLM assigns a severity level (Minimal/Moderate/Significant/Severe) with a numeric score per dimension. The weighted average becomes the overall severity score.

Full methodology: /scoring

Tech stack

Component	Technology
Framework	Next.js 16 (App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4)
Database	PostgreSQL 17 + Drizzle ORM
Charts	Recharts
AI Scoring	OpenRouter (configurable model)
News Sources	RSS feeds (10 sources) + GNews API
Validation	Zod
Hosting	Railway
CI	GitHub Actions

Architecture

GitHub Actions Cron (6 AM / 6 PM UTC)
       │
       ▼
  /api/cron/batch
       │
       ├── Fetch news (RSS + GNews)
       ├── LLM Pass 1: Classify articles → topics
       ├── LLM Pass 2: Score each topic (eco/health/econ)
       └── Store: upsert topics, dedup articles, append score history
       │
       ▼
  PostgreSQL 17 ◄── Next.js App Router ──► Dashboard UI

News sources

Source	Type
The Guardian Environment	RSS
Grist	RSS
Carbon Brief	RSS
Inside Climate News	RSS
EcoWatch	RSS
NPR Environment	RSS
Down to Earth	RSS
Mongabay India	RSS
GNews API	API (supplementary)

Running locally

Requires Node.js 18+ and PostgreSQL 17.

git clone https://github.com/sidtheone/ecoticker.git
cd ecoticker
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local
# Edit .env.local with your DATABASE_URL and API keys

npm run dev              # Dev server on :3000
npx drizzle-kit push    # Push schema to database
npx tsx scripts/seed.ts  # Seed demo data

Environment variables

Variable	Required	Description
DATABASE_URL	Yes	PostgreSQL connection string
OPENROUTER_API_KEY	Yes	API key from openrouter.ai
OPENROUTER_MODEL	No	Model ID (default: meta-llama/llama-3.1-8b-instruct:free)
GNEWS_API_KEY	No	API key from gnews.io — optional, RSS works without it
ADMIN_API_KEY	Yes	Admin key for write operations

Docker

cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d
docker compose exec app npx drizzle-kit push
docker compose exec app npx tsx scripts/seed.ts

Tests

npx jest                # Run all tests
npx jest --coverage     # With coverage report

680+ tests across 39 suites (98%+ statement coverage).

Security

• API key auth on all write endpoints
• Rate limiting (100/min read, 10/min write)
• Zod input validation
• Parameterized queries (no SQL injection)
• Content-Security-Policy headers
• Audit logging on all write operations
• GDPR: no cookies, truncated IPs, /data-policy page

License

MIT

Built with

Built by Sidharth Arora with Claude Code.