In 2025 — Earth's third warmest year on record — massive fires destroyed entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, a deadly heatwave killed more than 24,000 in Europe and powerful storms triggered catastrophic flooding in Southeast Asia. 

Scientists were quick to highlight the potential links between many of these disasters and a rapidly changing climate. But media coverage of climate change decreased by 14% in 2025 compared to 2024, according to a recent report from CU Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO).

Max Boykoff

“Over the past three and a half decades, climate change has become a high-stakes, high-profile, and highly-politicized venture involving science, policy, culture, psychology, environment and society,” said Max Boykoff, professor of Environmental Studies and a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

Boykoff, who is also the faculty executive director of the SPIKE Center for Sustainability Education, leads MeCCO’s efforts to track media coverage of climate change and understand messaging trends here in the U.S. and across the world. CU Boulder Today sat down with him to chat about the shift and the implications. 

What is the Media and Climate Change Observatory?

MeCCO is a collaborative project that monitors and assesses climate change and global warming coverage in 131 newspapers, radio, and television outlets spanning 59 countries and 14 languages. There is no other open-access resource like it available to researchers and practitioners, interested media outlets, and decision-makers across anywhere else in the world.

How do CU Boulder students support MeCCO?

In a new partnership between CIRES and the SPIKE Center for Sustainability Education, MeCCO is expanding student involvement and support at CU Boulder. As part of broader MeCCO activities, CU Boulder students also serve as SPIKE Student Emissaries, working with collaborators at universities, institutes, and organizations worldwide. Together, the 30-member team monitors climate-related news and produces monthly and annual summaries and explainers. The partnership expands MeCCO’s reach while building competence and confidence among participating researchers and students.

How does your team track changes in media coverage about climate change? 

In partnership with the University of Colorado Libraries, MeCCO team members produce open access datasets each month at the global level for newspaper and radio coverage. The team also evaluates newspaper coverage in seven regions — Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, North America and Oceania — as well as at the country level in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

We use existing news archives to assemble data, making sure we have broad geographic coverage, high circulation and reliable access to material.

What contributed to the decline in coverage in 2025? 

Ongoing political economic headwinds, and newsroom consolidation and reductions have contributed to this diminished coverage. Moreover, there is finite news space for competing stories, with the Trump administration flooding the public sphere with news stories across several domains. News editors and reporters may also sense that their readers are getting tired of reading and hearing about climate change when making decisions about what stories to cover. Furthermore, journalists may be hesitant to connect the dots between ecological and meteorological events like wildfires, and a changing climate due to the ongoing politicization of climate science, despite the fact that those links are clear within relevant expert scientific communities.  

How does this decline impact people’s awareness and understanding of climate change science?

People typically do not start their day with a cup of coffee and the latest peer-reviewed journal article. Instead, they turn to media — television, newspapers, radio, social media — to understand how science and policies could impact their everyday lives. This reality drives MeCCO’s work to monitor media coverage of climate change around the world and investigate how climate change coverage affects media consumers. When the media fail to cover these pressing climate issues abundantly and accurately, people may not recognize how climate change shapes their daily lives, livelihoods and challenges.

What are other ways scientists can reach people who might only hear about climate change issues from the news?

There are many ways scientists can creatively communicate and connect with different sectors of society. They can improve education and literacy, mobilize more effective advocacy efforts, raise individual-to collective-scale awareness, prompt behaviour change and promote cultural change. Through video, theatre, dance, and writing, scientists can connect new and wider audiences to climate change–tapping into experiential, emotional, visceral and aesthetic ways of learning that go beyond traditional communication.

“Doom and gloom” messaging is prevalent in the media. How do you inspire hope?

There are many alternative pathways to effectively communicate about climate-related issues. In collaboration with CU Boulder students, my colleague, Beth Osnes-Stoedefalke in the Department of Theater and I have explored avenues like studying fast fashion communication strategies and environmental impacts (an industry that contributes significantly to global warming) and sustainable fashion alternatives. 

We also explore how comedy may unexpectedly offer new routes to learning about climate change, overcoming often sober or gloomy scientific assessments through experiential, narrative, emotive and relatable storytelling. Humor can help increase accessibility to the complex and often-distant dimensions of climate change by bringing a long-term set of issues into the immediate social context. While comedy can provide relief amid anxiety-producing scientific results, it also serves to bridge difficult topics and overcome polarized discussions through entertaining and non-threatening ways to recapture a missing middle ground. These activities then provide space for young people — college-aged students most centrally — to hope and to work toward desirable, sustainable futures.