Despite 2025 being one of the warmest years on record, climate change saw the sharpest year-on-year fall in coverage of any issue monitored by Climate News Tracker.

by Rosie Frost (Journalism Insights Analyst), Alina Sandauer (Content Analyst) & Dr Lissa O’Reilly (Content Analyst)

13 March 2026

Analysis of TV and radio programmes from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky News by Climate News Tracker found a significant 12% drop in climate coverage year-on-year between 2024 and 2025.

The decline came despite 2025 being confirmed as the warmest and sunniest year on record in the UK.

The Met Office recorded a mean annual temperature of 10.09°C, only the second time the country has exceeded 10°C in a year.

Summer 2025 also set a new seasonal record, with average temperatures reaching 16.10°C, surpassing the previous high recorded in 2018.

Between January and December, the Office for National Statistics reported that 52.8% of adults, on average, identified climate change as one of the country’s most important issues.

Yet Climate News Tracker’s analysis shows that climate change was mentioned in just 31.3% of programmes on average across the public service broadcasters (PSBs) in 2025.

Key findings

• Climate coverage across the five UK public service broadcasters fell by a significant 12% between 2024 and 2025, the largest drop of any topic tracked.
• Climate change appeared in 31.3% of programmes on average, well below the 52.8% level of public concern recorded by the ONS.
• Coverage increases were largely event-driven, linked to extreme weather and major climate summits.

A persistent gap between climate coverage and public concern

ONS data provides a useful benchmark for understanding both what issues concern the public and how strongly people feel about them. Climate News Tracker uses this benchmark to assess whether broadcasters are covering the topics audiences consider most important.

Among the major issues tracked, immigration and the economy were the topics where coverage most closely matched levels of public concern. Crime and international conflict were both reported at levels exceeding their ONS concern scores.

Climate change, by contrast, never reached the level of public concern recorded by the ONS at any point during 2025, even during months when coverage increased.

Coverage of the NHS and the cost of living also fell below levels of public concern. All three issues appeared in significantly fewer programmes than their importance to the public would suggest.

Climate change coverage saw the largest drop of all topics

Climate change experienced the largest decline in coverage of any issue tracked by Climate News Tracker, falling 12% year-on-year.

Several other major public interest topics also saw reductions:

• Cost of living: coverage fell by 9% year-on-year.
• NHS: coverage declined by 7% year-on-year.
• Crime: coverage dropped by 2% year-on-year.

By contrast, some topics received increased media attention:

• Economy: coverage rose by 10% year-on-year.
• Immigration: coverage increased by 8% year-on-year.

These increases appear to reflect areas where political pressure and the news agenda drove greater media attention, regardless of levels of public concern.

Coverage of climate change was reactive

As in previous years, climate reporting in 2025 appeared to be event-driven rather than a sustained editorial priority for broadcasters. Spikes in coverage tended to coincide with major events that pushed climate up the news agenda.

In January, the Los Angeles wildfires caused the percentage of programmes mentioning climate change to rise to 45.5%, the highest monthly average of the year. This was also the point when coverage came closest to matching public concern levels, which reached 57% in January 2025.

In June, extreme summer weather, including heatwaves, wildfires and storms again pushed climate higher up the news agenda. That month, an average of 34.9% of programmes mentioned climate change.

In November, the start of the COP30 UN climate summit also triggered a rise in coverage. However, it is worth nothing reporting on the conference fell to a three-year low.

Climate News Tracker found that the summit received half as much coverage from PSBs as it did in 2024. Just 27% of flagship programmes across the five broadcasters mentioned the talks, compared with 55% during COP28 in Dubai in 2023.

None of the UK’s flagship political talk shows, ITV’s Peston, the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, and Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, mentioned the summit during the two-week COP30 period.

Despite record temperatures and steady public concern, climate change coverage across the five UK public service broadcasters declined in 2025 and remained consistently below levels of public interest.

The findings suggest that climate reporting on broadcast news continues to be driven largely by major events and political moments, rather than being treated as a continuous public-interest issue with regular space for it in the running orders.

Methodology

Public concern data is drawn from the ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey, which asks a nationally representative sample of adults to identify the issues they consider most important across 12-day collection periods. 

Broadcast data covers 21 flagship TV and radio news programmes from the BBC, ITV, Sky News, Channel 4, and Channel 5.

A programme is counted as covering a topic if at least one relevant keyword appears in the transcript.

This methodology is designed to measure the frequency of topic mentions only. It does not assess the quality, prominence, or editorial stance of coverage.

Full details of keyword selection, data processing, and error calculation are available on our methodology page.