Climate News Tracker analysis reveals that UK coverage of COP30 in Belém fell to a three-year low across Public Service Broadcaster TV and radio programmes

By Dr. Ruby Barrett and Alina Sandauer (Content Analysts)

December 2025

Photo: Ricardo Stuckert / Presidency of the Republic, CC BY-SA 4.0

While the annual UN climate conference in Brazil did not produce any dramatic last-minute deal, it was still described as “deeply divisive” by the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt and Matt McGrath.

As Sky’s Victoria Seabrook and Jack Levinson reported in their pre-summit explainer, uncertainty over the future of the talks comes “at a precarious time for climate action.”

Despite this, audiences of the UK’s most-watched and most-listened-to news programmes saw significantly less coverage than in previous years. Mentions of COP fell by around half compared with COP28 in 2023.

Climate News Tracker analysed flagship BBC radio and TV shows; breakfast, lunchtime and evening bulletins on Sky and ITV; and evening programmes on Channel 4 and Channel 5. We found that 27% of programmes mentioned COP, down from 55% in 2023.

Holding politicians to account

ITV’s Peston, the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, and Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips are the UK’s flagship political talk shows. These are programmes where politicians are scrutinised and policy positions put under pressure.

However, across all 5 political programmes broadcast by BBC, Sky News and ITV during the two-week COP30 period, none mentioned the climate negotiations. This is despite environmental issues making up the top four global risks over the coming years, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, which draws on insights from more than 900 experts worldwide.

Breakfast and evening bulletins on key days

Breakfast and evening bulletins are the most critical timeslots for ITV, BBC and Sky News.

We wanted to understand how often they covered the conference on the first, penultimate and final days of COP30. Our analysis shows the three broadcasters’ breakfast and evening shows devoted a total of 59 minutes, or 3% of total airtime, to the summit. This is around one-third of last year’s 127 minutes (9%), and well below the 194 minutes (8%) given to COP28.

Coverage has declined steadily in both programme types over the past three years. During COP30, breakfast shows mentioned the summit in about half of episodes, and evening bulletins in around 70%. By contrast, during COP28 and COP29, 100% of breakfast episodes mentioned the summit and around 90% of evening episodes did on the key dates.

Methodology

This analysis evaluates how the UK’s PSB covered COP28 (30 Nov – 13 Dec 2023), COP29 (11 – 24 Nov 2024), and COP30 (10 – 22 Nov 2025).  We combined a systematic transcript analysis with a manual “deep dive” review of peak-time news bulletins to ensure both breadth and accuracy.

1. Transcript Analysis

We scanned the transcripts of flagship news and political programming for the duration of each summit. We used a tested set of keywords to ensure robustness:

• Terms: “COP28/29/30”, “climate summit”, “conference of parties”, “Climate Change Conference”, “climate conference”, “climate negotiation”, “climate agreement”, and “Paris Agreement”.
• Host Cities: “Dubai”, “Baku”, and “Belém”.

Programmes Analysed:

• BBC: Breakfast, News at One, Six, and Ten; Newsnight; Radio 4’s Today, World at One, PM, The World Tonight, and The World This Weekend
• ITV: Good Morning Britain; Lunchtime, Evening, and News at Ten
• Sky News: Breakfast, Sky News Today, News Hour, and News at Ten
• Channel 4: Channel 4 News;
• Channel 5: 5 News at 5 and 5 News Weekend
• Political Shows: Peston (ITV), Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (BBC), and Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips (Sky)

2. Manual “Deep Dive” Verification

For these dates, every Breakfast and News at Ten bulletin on the BBC, ITV, and Sky News was manually viewed and analysed (BBC Breakfast, Sky News Breakfast, Good Morning Britain, BBC News at Ten, Sky News at Ten, and ITV News at Ten). This process allowed us to verify all COP-related references, eliminate transcript-level errors, and accurately record the duration and prominence of each segment.