Climate News Tracker analysis reveals that UK coverage of COP30 in Belém fell to a three-year low across Public Service Broadcasters’ 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

Audiences of the UK’s most-watched and most-listened-to news programmes saw significantly less coverage of COP30 than in previous years.

Coverage of the UN climate summit fell by around half across major UK news programmes compared to last year’s conference, a Climate News Tracker analysis has found.

Just 27% of flagship programmes on BBC, ITV, Sky, Channel 4 and Channel 5 mentioned the COP30 in Brazil, down from 55% during COP28 in Dubai in 2023.

The decline came amid warnings from broadcasters themselves about the state of climate diplomacy. Sky’s Victoria Seabrook and Jack Levinson described the talks as taking place “at a precarious time for climate action” in their pre-summit explainer. At the same time, the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt and Matt McGrath called the summit “deeply divisive”.

No mentions on flagship political shows

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, where politicians are scrutinised and policy positions put under pressure.

However, none of the five political programmes broadcast by the BBC, Sky News and ITV during the two-week COP30 period mentioned the climate negotiations.

Breakfast and evening bulletins on key days

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

Climate News Tracker analysed coverage on the first, penultimate and final days of COP30. These dates typically see the highest news value: the opening day sets the agenda and captures early reactions, the penultimate day often features intensive negotiations as deadlines loom, and the final day reveals whether a deal has been reached.

The three broadcasters’ breakfast and evening shows devoted a total of 59 minutes to the summit across these key dates, or just 3% of total airtime. 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 the episodes, and evening bulletins in around 70%. By contrast, during COP28 and COP29, 100% of breakfast episodes mentioned the summit on key dates, and around 90% of evening episodes did.

Methodology

This analysis evaluated how the UK’s public service broadcasters 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 errors, and accurately record the duration and prominence of each segment.