Why Climate Change Is Not in the News (in a Record-Hot Year)

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 can generate your message free at giftstory.ai and have a real tree planted in their name that they can follow and watch grow through their online Forest Profile.

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 the Media 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 their 2025 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 the London 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. The Reuters Institute found 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. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reports 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 on climate 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 whether anyone 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 can read the FN impact methodology to see exactly how that impact is measured in the field.

Imagine someone opening a gift, finding a real tree planted in their name, and watching its forest grow through their online Forest Profile, thinking about why it was sent each time they check on 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 can generate 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.