Why Climate Change Is Not in the News Anymore
For a few years, climate change was everywhere. It led the news, filled the feeds and framed elections. Lately it has gone quiet. If you have noticed the subject slipping out of the headlines and wondered. . .
For a few years, climate change was everywhere. It led the news, filled the feeds and framed elections. Lately it has gone quiet. If you have noticed the subject slipping out of the headlines and wondered whether you imagined it, you did not. The coverage really did fall, and it fell in a year that was one of the hottest ever measured. Here is the strange part. The science did not get quieter. The reporting did. This piece walks through the honest reasons climate change is not in the news the way it was, what the numbers actually show, and what any one of us can do when the media looks away. If you would rather act than wait for the next headline, you cangenerate your message free at giftstory. aiand plant a real tree that someone you care about can watch grow. Key TakeawaysMedia coverage of climate change fell 14 percent in 2025, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado Boulder. By 2024, coverage was already running 38 percent below the 2021 peak, and 2025 ranked just 10th in the 22 years MeCCO has tracked it. This happened even though 2025 was Earth’s third warmest year on record, with deadly fires, floods and a European heatwave. Public concern did not fall with the coverage. Weekly climate-news use dropped from 55 to 47 percent across eight countries between 2023 and 2025, a decline in supply, not interest. When the media goes quiet, individuals and companies can keep the story alive through small, visible action. Has climate change really fallen out of the news?Yes, and the drop is measurable. Media coverage of climate change fell 14 percent in 2025 compared with 2024, according to theMedia and Climate Change Observatory(MeCCO) at the University of Colorado Boulder. That was not a one-off dip. By 2024, coverage was already about 38 percent below the high-water mark of 2021, and 2025 ranked just 10th in the 22 years the MeCCO team has tracked global reporting, per their2025 special issue. What makes the fade so odd is the backdrop. 2025 was Earth’s third warmest year on record. It brought destructive fires, catastrophic flooding in Southeast Asia and a summer of extreme European heat that, according to theLondon School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, drove an estimated 16,500 additional deaths across 854 European cities. The story had never been more real. The coverage of it shrank anyway. Why is climate change not in the news right now?There is no single villain here. The quiet is the result of several ordinary pressures stacking up at once, and understanding them makes the moment less mysterious and easier to answer. Competing crises are crowding the agenda. A newsroom has a finite front page. War, the cost of living and sharp domestic politics have dominated the headlines, and every hour spent on them is an hour not spent on a slower-moving story like climate. When people are asked what worries them most, immediate threats tend to sit above the environment, and editors follow that attention. Newsrooms have less capacity than they did. Years of consolidation and cuts have thinned out specialist reporting. A dedicated climate or environment desk is often the first thing to go, and without reporters whose whole job is to connect the dots, the subject surfaces only around big summits and then disappears. Editors worry about fatigue. There is a genuine fear that audiences have heard enough doom and will switch off, so the temptation is to run the story less rather than to tell it better. The worry becomes self-fulfilling. Reporters hesitate to join the dots. Linking a specific heatwave, flood or fire to climate change once felt risky, so many stories still describe the disaster without naming the cause. The event gets covered. The pattern behind it does not. If fewer people see climate news, have they stopped caring?No, and this is the most important thing to understand. The falling coverage is a supply problem, not a demand problem. TheReuters Institutefound that the share of people who saw climate news in a given week slipped from 55 percent in 2023 to 47 percent in 2025 across eight countries. Their reading is that people’s interest held steady while the amount of climate news, especially on television, went down, so audiences encountered it less often. The mood underneath tells the same story. TheYale Program on Climate Change Communicationreports that 64 percent of Americans are worried about climate change, yet the amount they hear about it in the media has fallen to its lowest point since the survey began in 2015. Concern is up. Conversation is down. That gap is exactly what happens when a story leaves the front page but not people’s minds. We explore that quieter side in our piece onclimate fatigue and why we stopped talking. What happens when the story goes quiet?Attention is not a luxury for a problem like this. It is how public pressure, funding and political will stay pointed in the right direction. When the coverage thins, the risk is not that the planet cools down but that the sense of urgency does. The heatwaves keep coming. The audience just hears about them as isolated weather rather than a connected story. This is the paradox at the heart of the whole cluster, and it is worth sitting with. If you want the wider view of how a record-hot year and a quiet news cycle ended up side by side, start with the hub piece asking whetheranyone is still talking about climate change. How can you keep climate change in the conversation?Here is the hopeful turn. The media is not the only channel that carries this story. When the headlines go quiet, individuals and companies can keep it alive in a way that no editor controls, through small, visible action that other people see and remember. A planted tree is one of the simplest versions of that. It is not an abstraction on a dashboard. It is a living thing in a real place, and when you gift one and share it, the story travels person to person instead of headline to headline. ForestNation is a corporate tree gifting company that has helped more than 500 businesses plant nearly two million trees in Tanzania through verified reforestation programmes. Each tree is a contribution to reforestation you can name, track and point to, and you canread the FN impact methodologyto see exactly how that impact is measured in the field. Imagine someone opening a gift, planting it, and thinking about why it was sent every time they water it. That quiet moment does something a news alert cannot. It makes the climate story personal again, one relationship at a time. A tree is not a carbon claim. It is a message. It says the person who sent it cared enough to do something that keeps growing. You do not need a campaign or a budget to start. You cangenerate your message free at giftstory. ai, plant a real tree and share the story with someone who matters to you. When enough people do that, the conversation does not depend on the news cycle at all. Research and ReferencesMedia and Climate Change Observatory (2026). Climate change media coverage fell 14% in 2025. University of Colorado Boulder. colorado. eduMedia and Climate Change Observatory (2026). 2025 special issue. mecco. colorado. eduReuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2025). Climate Change and News Audiences Report 2025. reutersinstitute. politics. ox. ac. ukYale Program on Climate Change Communication. Climate Worries Rise but Dialogue Fades. environment. yale. eduLondon School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2025). Climate change-driven summer heat caused 16,500 additional deaths across Europe. lshtm. ac. ukAndrew PothecaryAndrew Pothecary is a pioneer in purpose-driven corporate gifting, with over 20 years of experience in the gift, eCommerce, and reforestation space. Since 2004, he has worked at the intersection of meaningful gifting and conscious consumerism, helping companies give with purpose and impact. In 2006, Andrew turned his focus to global tree planting and ecosystem restoration, launching large-scale reforestation projects and campaigns. By 2007, he was helping organizations shift from traditional promotional products to Tree Gifts that contribute to verified reforestation, reinventing client appreciation, event swag, and employee gifting with measurable impact at the core. Through ForestNation, Andrew empowers businesses to strengthen relationships while planting trees that restore biodiversity, support local communities, and contribute to verified reforestation in Tanzania. His work bridges genuine environmental contribution with brand storytelling, helping companies grow forests and deeper connections.