Felix Horne is a senior expert with Climate Rights International.
When The Washington Post laid off more than 300 staff last week, including journalists who covered climate and the environment, it was more than another grim headline about the state of the media. The cuts marked the loss of expertise and sustained scrutiny at one of the world’s most influential newsrooms, at precisely the moment when the climate crisis demands more reporting, not less.
These decisions do not simply downsize a business. They weaken public understanding of how climate change impacts lives, how cause and effect connect, and how power can be held to account.
Without expertise and experience, wildfires are reported without the underlying climate context that fuels them. Energy stories lose their climate dimension. Pollution is treated as an unfortunate accident rather than a foreseeable harm from fossil fuel dependence.
The facts still exist – but fewer people are paid, protected, or empowered to surface them, and with that goes people’s understanding of how climate is intimately intertwined with our lives.
These cuts follow a broader pattern across mainstream media in the United States, Europe and beyond. In 2024 and 2025 alone, major US outlets announced thousands of job losses.
CBS, CNN, NBC and other broadcasters cut newsroom staff. The Guardian has acknowledged sustained financial strain and has reduced or consolidated reporting capacity in recent years.
Meanwhile, local newspapers, the primary source of reporting on nearby floods, heatwaves, refineries, pipelines and mines, continue to disappear. In the US, more than 3,200 local newspapers closed since 2005, leaving large parts of the US without consistent, on-the-ground reporting.
Threats and harassment
Beyond closures, climate journalists face numerous threats. Journalists covering climate and environmental issues report rising harassment, legal threats and violence, particularly when reporting on fossil fuels, mining and land conflicts. One study found that 39% of journalists and editors covering the climate crisis had been threatened because of their work.
Online abuse, often coordinated and sustained, has become a routine tool for silencing climate reporting. And this doesn’t count the many fixers, translators, drivers and other local employees who face threats because of their role in this reporting, many of whom face a further loss of their livelihood because of these cuts.
At Climate Rights International (CRI), we document climate harms and human rights abuses linked to fossil fuels, mining and deforestation, among many other subjects. But our investigations do not exist in a vacuum.
They are often strengthened, and sometimes made possible, by local journalists who first uncover these harms, and by climate reporters who amplify our findings, connect them to broader patterns, and further our investigations by focusing on new angles, ongoing efforts at accountability or updated findings over time. They are indispensable to what we do and the impact we are trying to have.
When journalism retreats, misinformation fills the gap. In the absence of trusted, verified reporting, false or misleading climate narratives spread quickly online. Confusion replaces clarity about the reality of climate change: its links to energy choices, connections with the food we eat, and the scale of action required. Urgency erodes.
Climate change becomes less politically important when it becomes less visible. What is not reported is not discussed. What is not discussed does not become an issue for most voters, and therefore for politicians. The climate crisis can be manipulated by politicians as just another issue of special interest groups to balance with other interests, rather than being treated as the existential threat it is.
Fragile progress
To be clear, progress has been made. In recent years, climate considerations have been more consistently integrated into mainstream coverage of energy, economics, and geopolitics. Energy costs, rising food costs, migration, extreme weather and supply chains are now more often reported with climate dimensions in view.
But that progress is fragile. It depends on reporters and editors with climate expertise sitting in newsrooms, able to ask the second question, to connect today’s flooding with the climate crisis, and to connect today’s energy story to tomorrow’s climate harm.
This matters profoundly for fossil fuels, deforestation and transition minerals. Who is reporting on LNG terminals, new gas fields, lithium or nickel mining, the burning and clear-cutting of remote forests, or rising energy costs determines whether these developments are understood as narrow economic stories, or as climate and human rights choices with long-term consequences.
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Independent platforms, newsletters and Substack writers now produce some of the best climate coverage anywhere. They matter deeply. But they often reach audiences already paying attention to these issues. Mainstream media still plays a unique role: introducing climate realities to people who did not set out to read about climate change at all.
The erosion of climate journalism is unfolding alongside broader efforts to silence climate voices – through laws restricting protests, lawsuits aimed at stifling dissent, surveillance of activists and attacks on environmental defenders. CRI and others have documented how these tactics work together to suppress inconvenient facts.
Fewer journalists and fewer activists lead to less understanding of why climate is the story right now. The climate crisis will not pause because fewer people are paid to document it.
The question is whether societies choose to face our unfolding reality with evidence or allow silence and distortion to take its place. Supporting climate journalism is an investment in truth, accountability and a liveable planet for our children and future generations.
