Climate change on television reaches the engaged but misses distant audiences

Why your TV habits matter for the climate

Most of us still turn on the television for news and entertainment, especially in stressful times filled with war headlines, rising prices and worries about energy bills. This study asks a simple but crucial question: when climate change competes with all those other concerns, what actually shows up on our TV screens—and who is really paying attention? By tracking what German broadcasters aired during the turbulent autumn of 2022 and combining this with a nationwide survey, the researchers show that climate stories largely reach people who already care, while many others barely see them at all.

How much climate talk is on television?

The team recorded around 24,000 hours of programming from 20 major German TV channels over two months, then used speech recognition to spot climate-related keywords such as global warming, extreme weather and drought. The answer was sobering: only about 2.2% of broadcast time—roughly 514 hours—explicitly dealt with climate themes. In other words, out of many days of nonstop broadcasting, climate change occupied less than one hour in fifty. Even during a year of record heat and water shortages, topics like social issues, the war in Ukraine and the economy received more airtime.

News talks climate, entertainment looks away

Where climate does appear on television makes a big difference. Nearly four out of five minutes of climate coverage were found in information formats such as newscasts, talk shows and documentaries. Fiction, game shows and reality TV together carried only about a fifth of all climate minutes, with scripted stories like films and series devoting a mere 0.7% of their airtime to the subject. The news linked climate strongly to energy security, rising costs and heatwaves—showing that broadcasters tried to connect the issue to the unfolding energy and inflation crises. Yet everyday experiences, citizen voices and social protests appeared far less often than political and economic angles.

Who actually sees these climate stories?

To understand what different kinds of viewers notice, the researchers surveyed a representative sample of German adults and grouped them into six segments ranging from “alarmed” and “concerned” to “cautious,” “disengaged,” “doubtful” and “dismissive” about climate change. Television was the most frequently named source for climate news overall. But viewing patterns diverged sharply: highly engaged people watched a lot of news, where climate was most visible, while climate-sceptical and distant viewers spent more time with entertainment. Ironically, the groups least worried about climate change watched the most television—but the formats they preferred rarely contained climate content. These same groups also reported the highest levels of climate “fatigue,” saying they felt annoyed or tired of hearing about the issue.

Who gets to speak on screen?

The study also used facial recognition tools to examine who appears in climate-related TV segments. Across more than 70,000 detected faces, only about one third were classified as women, a gap that persisted in climate coverage and mirrors broader gender imbalances in German television. Yet most viewers mistakenly believed women were shown about as often as men. When asked which social groups they saw too much or too little, respondents said politicians dominated the screen, while older people, people with disabilities and scientists were underrepresented. Automated analysis backed this up: political figures received the largest share of airtime, with civil society groups, cultural voices and religious organizations barely visible.

What this means for future climate storytelling

For a layperson, the study’s message is clear: television still has the power to set a shared public agenda on climate change, but it is not using that power fully. Climate stories are mostly confined to news programmes that attract people already paying attention, while viewers who stick to series, shows and reality formats rarely encounter the issue at all. At the same time, the faces and voices on screen fail to reflect the diversity of the societies most affected. The authors argue that to reach distant audiences and build a wider sense of urgency and possibility, broadcasters will need to weave climate themes into popular entertainment, experiment with more engaging storylines and bring a broader range of people—beyond politicians and experts—into the frame.

Citation: Hoppe, I., Dörpmund, F., Weigel, C. et al. Climate change on television reaches the engaged but misses distant audiences. Nat. Clim. Chang. 16, 288–296 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02575-3

Keywords: climate communication, television news, media audiences, climate fatigue, public engagement