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Since the peak reached in autumn 2021, media coverage of climate change has fallen by nearly 40% worldwide, and even more in Europe. How can this be explained? Has the world grown indifferent? According to the 2025 Eurobarometer, 85% of Europeans still view climate change as a serious problem, and an analysis of media coverage and public opinion data shows that the topic has not disappeared: it has been eclipsed by other political, economic, cultural, and societal questions.
The planet is warming. Media interest is cooling
In the seven years following the Paris Agreement of 2015, 57 companies and states alone account for 80% of global fossil CO2 emissions. August 2026 proved to be the hottest month ever recorded on a global scale, with an average surface air temperature of 16.96 °C, i.e., 0.85 °C above the August average for the 1991–2020 period. Summer 2026 was the third hottest ever recorded across the European continent and the hottest in Western Europe.
One might expect these unusual weather conditions, scientifically linked to climate change, to alter how citizens, and then policymakers, perceive climate action. Yet, despite this evident acceleration, data from the Observatoire des médias et du changement climatique (MeCCO) show coverage has dropped by nearly half compared with 2021, the year it peaked thanks to COP26 in Glasgow.
In the United States, the period January through August 2026 was the warmest since records began in 1895. The average temperature there reached 14.43 °C, compared with 14.39 °C in 2012, the previous record. Over the same period, media coverage nevertheless fell by 25% compared with 2025. Temperatures continue to rise, while media attention keeps diminishing.
What the curve shows
The data we analyze come from MeCCO at the University of Colorado Boulder, which tracks the media coverage of climate change through 131 sources, in 14 languages and across 59 countries. The method involves surveying articles, examining the data to track how coverage evolves and to understand its dynamics. This analysis, however, has its limits. MeCCO’s series cover only the press, excluding television and social networks. For France, we monitor only two titles (Le Monde and Le Figaro), which provides only a partial view of the state of the debate.
In November 2021, during COP26, climate coverage reached its highest point in the period observed. By COP30 in 2025, it had fallen by nearly half on a global scale. In Europe, the decline is even more pronounced: after a peak in 2021, coverage has continued to retreat, dropping to around one third of its 2021 average by early 2026. In France, coverage mirrors the European trend. Yet attention peaks tied to summit events last much longer there than in the rest of continental press: coverage remained at or near 2021 levels through 2024, with the sharpest declines only occurring in 2025.
Since 2021, coverage has experienced several spikes, largely linked to United Nations Climate Change Conferences, although most – with the exception of COP27 in 2022 for France – have not recovered to COP26 levels. It has also risen during the 2023 heatwave, which led United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to declare: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of boiling has begun.” Between these moments of high attention, it recedes. Climate change is thus treated as a sequence of discrete events, rather than as a background, structural phenomenon.
In recent years, media coverage follows the global diplomatic calendar or the meteorological events: a major political rendezvous or a disaster is needed to capture media attention. The summer of 2026 was no exception: French coverage of climate exceeded its 2021 average once more. One might conclude that editorial desks simply respond to readers’ demand and that the news reflects public expectations, but, in reality, that is not always the case.
The public has not turned the page
The most obvious explanation would be that the public is focusing on other major problems – inflation, wars, the rise of artificial intelligence – or that it has grown tired of climate, in a form of “climate fatigue.” In Europe, polls say otherwise. According to Eurobarometer 2025, 85% of Europeans questioned consider climate change a serious problem. More notably, 52% of them believe traditional media fail to provide clear information on the topic. A 2025 Reuters Institute survey conducted in eight countries reveals the same public fracture: in France, only 36% of respondents say they trust the media to inform them about climate change (the lowest rate among the eight countries studied), and climate information has been losing ground: interest reported fell from 81% to 76%, and weekly consumption dropped by 15 percentage points since 2022. This turnout deficit is therefore not a demand problem. The public has not abandoned climate – it is the newsrooms that have.
Google Trends confirms this trend. Searches for “climate change” show notable spikes in April 2022, 2023, and 2024. What caused them? Earth Day.
Ce n’est plus le cas aujourd’hui : en 2025ité et 2026, il célébrait la beauté de la planète, sans mentionner le « changement climatique ». On retrouve ici, appliqué à Google, le constat que le politologue Bernard Cohen formulait en 1963 à propos de la presse: celle-ci ne parvient peut-être pas à dire aux gens ce qu’ils doivent penser, mais réussit « avec un succès stupéfiant » à leur indiquer à quoi penser.
En dehors de ces pics, les recherches en ligne ne suivent ni la courbe de la couverture médiatique ni le seul calendrier de la Journée de la Terre. En février 2026, le cinquième mois de février le plus chaud jamais enregistré, les recherches Google sur « changement climatique » ont ainsi augmenté à l’échelle mondiale, sans que la couverture médiatique suive. Alors que les internautes cherchaient à relier ces conditions inhabituelles au changement climatique, les médias n’ont pas répondu à leurs attentes.
D’où cette question : qu’est-ce qui a pris la place du changement climatique ?
Erased or eclipsed?
Among the crises the world is navigating, three in particular have helped push climate change further down the media agenda.
First, wars broke out. In February 2022, only a few months after COP26, Russia invaded Ukraine. In a matter of weeks, European attention shifted away from climate questions toward security and energy crises. Then, in October 2023, the Gaza war began. These acute crises edged out chronic problems like climate change. MeCCO data, however, show that in 2022 and 2023 European coverage of climate change rose briefly on several occasions, suggesting the topic remained present in the press. The drastic declines came later, in 2024 and 2025, intensifying in 2026.
Second, a new technology emerged. After the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI-related searches quickly overtook climate-change searches by roughly 27 to 1. Even if many internet users were probably looking for a tool rather than a subject, the magnitude of the gap is telling. While climate change used to be a central topic, AI established a new frame for discussion and invaded the media space.
Third, Donald Trump’s return to the White House began. His second term opened in January 2025 with the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, effective a year later. As journalists around the world watched Washington, the administration’s statements on climate change were largely dismissive. Yet Trump merely amplified a trend already at work, particularly within the United States: the politicization of climate change in the media and in public discourse.
Was climate change erased or merely eclipsed? The facts favor the second hypothesis. The public remains deeply concerned; but war, artificial intelligence, and politicization are monopolizing media attention.
A campaign in the shadow of political economy?
In 2024, according to Reuters Institute, the French public was the most attentive to climate information among the eight countries studied: 60% of respondents said they had followed it in the previous week. Le Monde and Le Figaro, for their part, kept climate coverage alive longer than the overall European press. Nevertheless, attention given to climate in France continues to fall. As noted, the share of French people who inform themselves about climate weekly has dropped by 15 points since 2022, while three out of four still claim to be interested in it.
Yet this reality is overshadowed by broad dynamics of political economy (the relationship between political power, public policies, and economic systems) and by the devaluation of climate journalism. In the United States, CBS News shut down its climate team at the end of 2025, and early 2026 saw the Washington Post cut 14 jobs in its climate-journalism division. The functioning of mass media exists within a wider cultural-political context (the way meaning is constructed and negotiated across space and place), which concretely shapes material realities and social practices, highlighting certain issues while obscuring others.
Multinational media groups have continued to consolidate, producing a globalized, leaner landscape with increasing power concentration, largely in the hands of a few billionaires (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry and David Ellison) and private investment funds. This hyper-commercialized architecture has not supported, and will not support, the emergence of a broad and substantial climate-change narrative. The acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount, completed on October 6, 2026, is the latest in a series of deals detrimental to media coverage of the climate.
Because some topics capture more media attention than others, political actors might conclude that the public is losing interest in climate change. Yet French policymakers do indeed hold positions on climate; they simply present them to the press from different angles. On the right, in coverage of candidates such as Marine Le Pen and Bruno Retailleau, environmental regulations appear excessive and unnecessary, with emphasis on adapting to current conditions and on populist solutions such as cooling during heatwaves. In the center-left and left, Raphaël Glucksmann, Marine Tondelier, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon place climate change at the heart of their campaigns, but must cope with an ever-narrowing media climate on climate topics.
This reduction in media coverage should alert the European public as several key elections approach on the continent. Indeed, if candidates are rarely questioned about climate, they do not have to defend positions or stand by them. That silence has its limits: if candidates avoid addressing climate during campaigns, they will still have to make decisions on it once elected. In the face of a worried public that feels underinformed, candidates have an opportunity to speak on the topic outside of major summits and to fill this vacuum.
The World Meteorological Organization forecasts that a very intense El Niño episode will raise the risk of extreme weather events through 2027. If the observed trend continues, climate change could re-emerge at the forefront of the news. That would not, however, mean the eclipse is over: the topic could disappear from the media once again. For the grand election year 2027 to be an exception, weather events would need to be accompanied by a political-economic shift and a genuine will among journalists and policymakers to keep climate at the heart of public debate.