“The planet is overheating,” read a recent headline from Grist, the long-running environment-focused news organization. “Why is the news looking away?” Grist reported a 38% reduction in climate coverage by the media worldwide in 2025 since a high-water mark in 2021, using data from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Additionally, Media Matters for America has found a 35% decrease in climate-related airtime on U.S. broadcast channels CBS, ABC, and NBC since 2024.
For decades, researchers have tracked media attention on climate issues using keywords like “climate change” and “global warming.” This unique longitudinal dataset provides the evidence to support recent reports of diminishing climate journalism.
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But tracking keyword volume tells only one part of the story, and fails to demonstrate the real peril facing climate journalism. The bottom line is that climate is a profoundly underreported issue. According to newly released preprint data from an international team of researchers, climate journalism makes up just .55% of reporting from top news organizations in the United States, with minor variations over the last 40 years. Reports of increases or decreases over short time horizons miss this bigger picture, and don’t take into account the complexity of how journalists report climate-related stories today.
What matters more is who is doing the reporting. The health of climate journalism is not best measured by the volume of coverage; instead, it’s about the people. Recent layoffs of climate reporters and editors by major news organizations are a serious warning sign about the vitality of the beat.
Just a few years ago, leading news organizations like the Associated Press, National Public Radio, and The Washington Post expanded their climate reporting teams. Now many are pulling back. In late 2025, Paramount slashed 100 employees at CBS News, gutting the climate team. This left one reporter to cover the topic at a broadcaster long known for its climate journalism leadership. In April, that reporter was laid off, too, leaving no climate reporters at CBS News.
When the Post laid off almost half its storied newsroom in February, that included 14 climate journalists, a 74% reduction of the climate desk.
Recent layoffs of climate reporters and editors by major news organizations are a serious warning sign about the vitality of the beat.
Then in May, NPR laid off the top editor on its much-heralded climate desk as part of a broader newsroom reorganization and staff reduction on the heels of federal funding cuts to public media. In total, combining buyouts and layoffs, NPR cut 28 positions across the newsroom, including two on the climate team. The remaining eight climate reporters and editors joined the national desk. These cuts came at the conclusion of NPR’s fourth Climate Solutions Week, an initiative launched by the climate reporting team after it was founded in 2022. NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride reported that NPR plans to continue the Climate Solutions Week project.
Climate is a complex beat with political, cultural, economic, and policy dimensions. While ensuring that all journalists have some climate training can address newsroom needs to some degree, it’s not realistic to cover climate by tacking it onto other beats as an extra task for already-strapped reporters to handle. In fact, this flawed logic has been used by newsroom managers as justification for reducing climate positions.
Climate reporting must be informed by an underlying understanding of the human-caused drivers of climate change. This is why specialist positions held by journalists familiar with reporting on the climate crisis are essential.
News organizations with climate or environmental reporters on staff are much more likely to connect extreme heat to climate change in coverage and to discuss climate solutions, as compared to news organizations without these dedicated positions in the newsroom.
Recent layoffs may not result in fewer climate change mentions like the ones tracked by researchers. Often, overly taxed generalist reporters employ “climate change” or “global warming” keywords in passing, with little serious engagement with the issue.
In our view, climate reporting does not have to use particular keywords or even express a direct connection to fossil fuel emissions to count as climate journalism. For example, The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy multimedia piece about the devastation wrought by glacial tsunamis caused by warming temperatures in the mountains of Nepal. No trackable climate-related keywords appear, but it’s a clear example of reporting about the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities. Reporting on the environmental impacts of data centers and energy infrastructure is rapidly growing within the climate beat, but coverage often lacks explicit mention of climate change.
Excellence in climate reporting comes not from keywords but from the specialist knowledge that climate and environmental journalists bring to their work, from the topics they select to the people they interview and the questions they ask. That is why who is doing the coverage is so crucial.
A strong climate reporting corps is our best hope for thoughtful journalism that serves the public. In many ways we still have that, in dedicated teams like those at The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, and in thriving specialist news organizations like Grist andInside Climate News. It is also happening in the burgeoning creator journalist space, like the video podcast “Heated” that independent climate journalist Emily Atkin launched in February with producer Tracy Wholf, who had been laid off by CBS News in 2025.
As the past year has demonstrated, however, institutional support for climate reporting is often on the razor’s edge. This follows decades of inconsistent investment in environmental journalism. Too often, climate and environmental reporting are treated like extra or luxury beats. This is a mistake. Audiences want and need climate news.
Too often, climate and environmental reporting are treated like extra or luxury beats. This is a mistake. Audiences want and need climate news.
The real challenge is to find sustainable pathways for climate journalists to work and thrive. That must include independent journalists, who have long constituted a significant percentage of the climate reporting workforce.
Our collective future relies on the presence of climate journalists throughout the media ecosystem. And that’s what we should be tracking.
Suzannah Evans Comfort is an associate professor of journalism at Indiana University and the author of “The Environmental Beat: Inside the Struggle to Legitimize the Environment as News” (University of Missouri Press, 2026).
Jill Hopke is an associate professor of journalism at DePaul University in Chicago, where she teaches climate change communication and climate journalism. She is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) board of directors, representing academic membership.
