How interested are audiences in climate news? How often do they believe they’re encountering climate-related misinformation? Do they follow high-profile events such as COP? And how can journalists best engage them regarding the climate crisis?

These were some of the questions explored at a special event we organised following the publication of the third edition of our yearly report into how audiences in eight countries access climate news. The panel, moderated by our acting director Mitali Mukherjee, featured Dr Waqas Ejaz, the report’s lead author; Katherine Dunn, content editor of our Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN); and Ivan Couronne, Future of the Planet Global Editor at AFP and member of the OCJN's Advisory Board. Here are seven takeaways from the event.

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1. Public engagement with climate news hasn’t gone up for a while.

“I think the one thing that stood out was how remarkably stable people have been, both in terms of engaging with the topic of climate change and how their attitudes have been over the past three years,” Ejaz said. This phenomenon, which he calls ‘climate perception inertia’, occurred despite the increased intensity of extreme weather events and rising temperatures recorded since we began collecting data in 2022.

“There was a disconnect. What I felt was that people have stopped paying attention to the urgency of the crisis, or there’s a ceiling effect that that's the best people could come up with in terms of engaging with that topic,” he added.

However, news organisations’ justifications for this lack of breakthrough can be unhelpful. They can focus on the perceived lack of audience interest rather than innovative ways to report on the climate. Dunn recalled the conversations she had with members of the OCJN when it first started in 2022 and how many of the same points are used today by news organisations to justify a lesser focus on the climate. 

 “Russia invaded Ukraine at the start of the OCJN, and we had people coming in saying, ‘My editors say this isn't interesting, we have bigger problems.’ A lot of these are actually myths or things that we have to dissect a little bit more. But they're very pervasive, and they are affecting climate journalism, and in that sense, it's no different than what we were hearing three years ago.”

What is different though is that we also have more examples of successful climate journalism that does attract audience attention, she added. “We have really tangible examples, and we have newsrooms that are doing it successfully, and it's working. So there's no excuse anymore.”

2. Look to France for a different approach.

Climate news and information consumption is higher in France (60%) than in the other countries surveyed. Couronne explained that the attitude towards climate news in the country has shifted in the past few years, following major heatwaves in 2022. Since then, large newsrooms have adopted full corporate-editorial climate strategies.

“They appointed climate editors, they restructured the newsroom, and now every night on French TV at the 8 pm evening news on the top two channels, you have good quality climate content every single day,” he said.

Couronne also pointed out that television news was the most common way for our report survey respondents to access climate change information. “That tells me the old word isn't dead, right? It's legacy media,” he remarked.

3. News avoidance and declining trust also impact climate news.

It is genuinely challenging for the news media to make climate news feel new and relevant. Climate reporters and editors have to combat overarching negative trends which are affecting the whole industry, such as the rising tide of news avoidance across all news topics. “The news media specifically is dealing with declining news trust in general, and increase in news avoidance, and it is regardless of any type of news,” Ejaz highlighted.

The two main reasons for audiences avoiding climate news, Ejaz explained, are that it negatively impacts their mood and that they don’t see any new information relevant to them in climate news reports. There is a disconnect here, he remarked, between how audiences would like climate news to be, and how news organisations work in practice, and that is a difficult problem to solve.

4. Prepare for the summer.

“I always say the most important climate event of the year for the media is not COP, it's the summer. So this is what we have to prepare for, I'm not preparing COP at all right now, I'm preparing this summer,” Couronne said. The summer is when extreme weather events like heatwaves and wildfires are more likely to happen and is also when audiences are more likely to seek out climate information related to these events.

For news organisations, this is also something they can and should prepare for. “There's a list of things you should do. Do you have written guidelines for your newsroom, not just for your climate reporters? Have you trained your business or political editors? It's going to be breaking news when there's a disaster, and schools close, the government response is not up to the task, so you have to prepare for all of this, and there's a lot of safety also. How are you going to dress when you're going to cover that fire? How do you park your car near a fire? How much water do you take, how much food, how are you going to recharge your batteries, all of this needs to be prepared,” Couronne explained. 

Dunn reiterated this point, calling on news organisations which struggle with climate coverage to focus on extreme heat, an increasingly regular and dangerous problem that affects millions of people around the world each year: “Develop a heat strategy. Climate might feel really bad, big, political, complex, but start with heat,” she said.

5. Find stories that are relevant to your audience.

Heatwaves and other extreme seasonal events are also local stories, and this angle is the one audiences are more likely to be interested in while they’re experiencing these events. “When people say they want local news, and they're not getting it because of the media ecosystem, they're saying they want stuff that's useful. Tell me, can I take my dog for a walk? How scared do I need to be if I'm pregnant and it's 40 degrees?” Dunn said.

Focusing on the local angle of these big stories is a way to better serve your audience’s needs. This, however, doesn’t mean that journalists ignore the systemic changes that are leading to climate change worldwide. “I still think most stories can be a climate story… Sometimes all you need is a line. Sometimes it is such low-hanging fruit,” Dunn said.

On the other hand, in a political environment where mentioning climate change might be controversial for some audience segments, focusing on individual events and processes might be a helpful way to communicate climate information without alienating readers, Couronne said.

“We're in a different time today, and I think we have to be careful about language. One way to address that is to be very concrete and say that the Gulf of Mexico has never been hotter, and this is how it's feeding the intensity of storms. This is much more efficient and maybe for some readers, it's going to be more acceptable as language. I think it's a win-win because you explain the mechanism without talking about climate change in general, which might seem abstract,” he said.

6. Rethink how you cover COP.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties (COP), is a yearly headline event for climate change news. However, some of the ways in which it is covered are at odds with what audiences say they want from climate news in general. Often,  a focus on world leaders and the minutiae of negotiations take precedence over bigger-picture issues and their local impacts, which audiences feel are more relevant to them.

“Some of the COP coverage is replicating some elements of political journalism that, in every single Digital News Report, audiences are saying they do not like. If you're working for a political or climate blog, you can get in the weeds. But for regular people, these are photos of Boris Johnson. This is people meeting. They may as well be covering G7 in Davos with an apocalypse tone to it all,” Dunn said.

“Watch the big themes. We tell people to go and get loads of ideas. But it's got to feel local. It's got to feel tangible. And I think we should trade out fewer COP stories for a few more local biodiversity stories, stories that sometimes editors think are quite soft and fluffy. We talked to scientists over and over again, and they say, for the lowest hanging fruit that will make the biggest difference tomorrow, go out into your local community and write a local biodiversity story about somebody restoring their local park,” she suggested.

7. Cater to the majority of your audience, not the loudest members.

Unfortunately, climate reporters are often targeted by online trolls who spread misinformation and harass them. While this is an important issue that news organisations should take seriously, it is perpetrated by a small, loud minority and shouldn’t dictate news organisations’ climate coverage, Dunn said.

“I think there is a danger about conflating the people who spend loads of time spreading disinformation and harassing journalists online as being a sizable part of the news audience,” she said. 

This is not reflected in the data collected in this report and others, which shows large proportions of news audiences interested in climate news and concerned about the impact of climate change and its effects on their lives.

“We know people care. We know it's hard for them to think about, we know it can be depressing and lack novelty, but they do care, and they do believe in this stuff,” she said.