There was a decline in coverage of climate change in 2025. Professor Max Boykoff explains.

Max Boykoff is a Professor in the Environmental Studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is a Fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Boykoff is the inaugural Faculty Executive Director of the Buckley Center for Sustainability Education. He has ongoing research interests in science and environmental communications, science-policy interactions, political economy, and business and the environment.

Boykoff has experience working in several country contexts, and is a co-author and editor of seven books and edited volumes, along with many articles, reports and book chapters. He also leads the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) while he co-Directs Inside the Greenhouse. Boykoff earned a PhD in Environmental Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, an MBA from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a BS in Psychology from The Ohio State University. He also writes a column on environmental and sustainability topics for the Daily Camera.

In 2025, MeCCO detected that climate-related issues, events, and developments garnered less frequent coverage through intersecting political, economic, scientific, cultural as well as ecological and meteorological themes than in recent years.

According to MeCCO, coverage across the globe diminished 14% in 2025 from the previous year 2024 and was 38% lower than the highest year of coverage in 2021. And 2025 coverage ranks just 10th in the past 22 years the MeCCO team has tracked coverage of climate change or global warming across the global news sources.

Boykoff joined us live in the studio to discuss.

This story aired on A Public Affair, KGNU’s weekday morning show featuring in-depth discussions on local news issues. Click here to listen to other episodes of A Public Affair.