It’s been slow coming, but news coverage of climate change may at last be turning a corner. For years, reporting on climate-related disasters — the super-storm Hurricane Helene that blasted the southeastern US in 2024, the mega-fires that torched Los Angeles in 2025, the record heat that has scorched Europe and Asia in 2026 — rarely mentioned the words “climate change,” despite overwhelming scientific evidence linking such extreme events to human-caused global heating. This week, however, even formerly reticent news outlets are making the climate connection clear in their coverage of the deadly flooding in Nepal, where more than 1,100 are confirmed dead and an additional 4,000 are missing.
More such disasters are sure to follow. Even with unprecedented emissions reductions, global temperatures will rise to at least 1.8 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial levels, the UN Environment Programme announced yesterday. As rising temperatures melt more glacial ice, “we can expect more and more of these events, a greater frequency, a greater magnitude,” Alton C. Byers of the University of Colorado, Boulder, said at a Covering Climate Now live conversation on the Nepal floods.
Meanwhile, The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Deutsche Welle, and other outlets whose reporting has long reflected established climate science, suddenly, are no longer outliers. The shift is particularly striking among US television networks, whose climate coverage had declined by 35% during the first year of US president Donald Trump’s second term.
NBC News did not mince words in an August 28 report, with graphics that spelled out the climate connection: “Past 60 Years Glacial Loss increased 4X, Glaciers Less Stable Worldwide From Melting.” Even CBS News has noted, more than once, the climate connection to the Nepal disaster. This despite a president, Bari Weiss, who has fired the entire CBS News climate unit, derided climate change in newsroom meetings as “woke,” and intervened to push the network’s reporting to the right on a range of topics, above all Israel. Referring to the “glacial burst” that triggered the gargantuan flood that swept away buildings, roads, and bridges, the CBS Evening News stated on August 26 that, “Experts believe this is linked to climate change.” On August 31, CBS’s morning news show interviewed scientist Daniel Swain while graphics told viewers, “Climate Change Impacting Extreme Weather Events, Shifting Global Sea Levels, Ecosystems, and Human Health.”
The Nepal coverage has demonstrated the importance of public officials speaking plainly, thus giving journalists a peg to make the climate connection to extreme events. Each of the Big Three US networks, CNN, the BBC, and other international news organizations headlined the statement by Nepal’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, blaming the flooding on global warming. Days later, Kahnal said that Nepal is demanding compensation from the world’s biggest emitters.
Such high-profile coverage predictably irritated the tiny but noisy band of bots and cheery-picking blowhards who still deny climate change. The opinion section of The Wall Street Journal, which has disparaged climate science since the 1990s, published an article on August 28 that studiously avoided engaging with the actual scientific expertise other outlets had cited. Instead, it accused “the Western media” of rushing to judgment by embracing its “all-purpose explanation for everything: climate change.”
The Journal’s accusation was hardly more persuasive than that of an online conspiracy theorist who tried to blame the Nepal floods on a research project in Alaska. The fact checking unit of AFP, which delivers news to thousands of news outlets and government offices worldwide, quickly slapped down that absurdity: “AFP has repeatedly debunked claims that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is to blame for extreme weather events, and scientists say manipulation cannot cause floods of this magnitude — instead pointing to human-caused global warming.”
Why the Nepal disaster has called forth more plainspoken climate coverage than usual is, at this point, unclear. The availability of stunning video showing the awesome size, speed, and force of the flood was doubtless a factor. But that can’t be the sole explanation: The images of Helene’s ferocious winds and of Los Angeles hillsides engulfed in flames were no less eye-catching. Yes, the link between higher global temperatures and melting glaciers makes intuitive sense, but is it any more intuitive than the connection between higher temperatures and the extreme heat that has killed 35,000 people and counting in Europe this summer?
In any case, the question now is where climate coverage goes from here. Nepal’s floods are a textbook illustration of the stark injustice at the heart of the climate story: The people who did the least to cause the problem tend to be the ones who suffer the first and worst. As Bill McKibben noted on his Substack, “The Crucial Years,” “on average, Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American.”
At the COP28 UN climate summit in 2023, the world’s governments operationalized a Loss and Damage Fund to compensate victims of climate disasters. Contributions have been paltry, but The Nation reported this week that the fund’s board of governors was discussing whether to make an inaugural donation to Nepal as a symbol of why the fund needs to be fully capitalized. As journalists and newsrooms prepare to cover the COP31 summit in Turkey this November, the long-standing debate around climate loss and damage deserves our focused attention.
Nepal’s floods also highlight another aspect of the climate story: Who is responsible for all those losses, and who should pay for the damages? To date, most reporting has trod lightly on these questions, even though a handful of investigative exposés have made clear who the chief culprits are. “A 1981 internal memo written by the director of one of Exxon’s science labs said it was ‘distinctly possible’ that cumulative carbon emissions could eventually ‘produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial portion of the earth’s population),” author Jeff Goodell pointed out the day after the Nepal floods.
Exxon and other companies hid that science for decades, instead pressing for ever-increasing fossil fuel production and consumption. If holding power to account is a core duty of journalism, then connecting the dots between Big Oil and the Nepal floods, and other coming disasters that Big Oil’s delaying tactics have made inevitable, is a good place to start.
From Us
Watch: Examining Nepal’s Deadly Flood & Its Climate Connection. Nepali journalists and a mountain geographer specializing in glacier hazards shared how their country is responding to the crisis and how climate change is connected in this live conversation, co-hosted with the Disability Justice Project.
RSVP: Climate Film Festival. Join CCNow for a live, in-person conversation with climate journalists on Monday, September 21, at the Narrative Change Summit during Climate Week NYC, hosted by Climate Film Festival. RSVP here!
Great Nepal coverage. We’re pulling together a collection of stories that make the climate connection to the glacier collapse and deadly flooding in Nepal. Share the thread.
Noteworthy Stories
“Limiting Overshoot.” The world will surpass 1.5 degrees C of warming, missing the Paris Agreement target set to limit extreme climate impacts with perilous consequences for people and ecosystems, according to a first-of-its-kind UN report published Wednesday. In the report, nearly 50 scientists make recommendations for reversing global warming instead of limiting it. By Sarah Kaplan for The Washington Post…
- “Can we really reverse global warming after overshooting 1.5°C?” By Michael Le Page in New Scientist…
Doubling down. On Wednesday, Chevron announced a $7 billion investment that will double its Venezuelan oil production after “a major push from the Trump administration.” Several other oil and gas companies are expected to announce deals this week. By Collin Eaton and Gareth Vipers for The Wall Street Journal…
European emissions. France’s wildfires sent 1.5 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere, the largest amount since tracking began in 2003, according to a new report from the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation service. By Perrine Mouterde for LeMonde…
“Space race.” As billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos tout the advantages of outer space for building new data centers and geoengineering satellites, a new term — “space washing” — highlights the harmful climate impacts they gloss over. By Kate Yoder for Grist…
AI & climate. A new report finds that the AI computations that enable oil and gas companies to find and exploit new areas for drilling will increase global emissions by 5%. By Arcelia Martin for Inside Climate News…
Vast undercount. A two-year investigation by NPR found that the total number of US heat-related deaths per year was significantly higher than official records report. By Alejandra Borunda for NPR…
On the Beat
Kudos to The Guardian’s Damian Carrington, whose 2023 reporting on “mind-boggling” methane leaks from fossil fuel fields in Turkmenistan, has led to its government taking action to begin plugging the leaks. “It’s not often you can pinpoint real, positive change a journalist has caused,” noted UK journalist George Monbiot on Bluesky, “but as Turkmeni sources state, Carrington’s persistent and probing coverage of this issue has been critical to a change of policy, with massive implications.”
Community News Act. The California legislature approved a bill that offers refundable tax credits to local news organizations to help them hire and retain reporters. Governor Gavin Newsom has until September 30 to sign or veto it. By Suhauna Hussain for the Los Angeles Times…
New season, new cohost. Bill McKibben is joining Ayana Elizabeth Johnson this season to cohost her podcast, What If We Get It Right?
Climate on the Ballot
We’re relaunching our US election newsletter in September. You can sign up here. Meanwhile, draw inspiration to help jumpstart your reporting on the 2026 US midterms from these recommended reads.
- “Why state leaders must act on clean energy as electricity demand rises” op-ed by Jay Inslee on Substack
- “Pennsylvania’s A.I. Gold Rush Meets Second Thoughts” By David Gelles for The New York Times
- “Emerging as Maine’s Democratic Senate Candidate, Troy Jackson Wants to Talk About Climate and Renewables” By Nathaniel Eisen for Inside Climate News
- “148 Michigan politicians sign ‘no utility money’ pledge” By Brian Allnut for Planet Detroit
- “Meet the super PAC working to crush clean energy’s political foes” By Julian Spector for Canary Media
- “The Top Five States to Watch for Clean Energy Policy” By Jael Holtzman for Heatmap News
Resources & Events
- “Industrial Equity Mapper: Stories of Industrial Pollution in the US” (Industrious Labs)
- “Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year” (Carbon Brief)
- This Nonprofit-Based Data App Could Change How You Cover Wildfires” (Global Investigative Journalism Network)
- “The take-off in African solar that official statistics can’t yet see” (Ember)
- “Misrepresentation of Human Climate Fingerprint in DOE Report” (Advancing Earth andSpace Sciences)
- “Explainer: The CMIP7 emissions scenarios – and how they explore future climate change” (Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief)
- “No Transition Without Justice: Strengthening Environmental Rule of Law for People and Planet” (UN Environment Programme)
- “Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather” (Carbon Brief)
- RSVP: How Public Opinion Is Affecting Data Center Development with Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, TODAY at 12pm ET.
- RSVP: Mental Health in Journalism Summit with The Self Investigation, hosted virtually from October 6–9.
Jobs, Etc.
Jobs. Semafor is hiring an Asia Editor (remote, ideally Singapore). Dialogue Earth is hiring an Editor (Brazil). Spectrum News is hiring a National Meteorologist (Dallas, Texas). The Houston Chronicle is hiring an Energy and Data Center Reporter (Houston, Texas). Spotlight PA and Grist are hiring an Environment Reporter (Pennsylvania, remote). Twin Cities PBS is hiring an Environmental & Natural Resources Reporter (St. Paul, Minn.). Baltimore Public Media is hiring an Environmental Reporter (Delmarva and Baltimore, Md.). Oxford University is hiring a Oxford Climate Research Network (OCRN) Coordinator (Cambridge, UK). The Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund is hiring a Marketing & Communications Manager (remote, US). The New York Times is hiring a Correspondent, The Economics of a Warming World (New York, NY) and a Climate Policy Correspondent (Washington, DC). The Globe & Mail is hiring an Energy Reporter (Ottawa, Canada).
Fellowships & Grants.
- Evident is accepting applications for a year-long investigative journalism fellowship beginning October 2026 based in the Baltimore / Washington, DC area; apply by September 20.
- The Vital Impacts Environmental Photography fellowship and mentorship program is accepting submissions for long-term visual storytelling projects related to communities working on environmental solutions; apply by November 30.
- Earth Journalism Network is offering a number of opportunities for journalists and media-related organizations; various deadlines.
- The Pulitzer Center is offering Work/Environment Reporting Grants with a particular interest in reporting from regions in Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
Correction: Nepal’s foreign minister’s name was misspelled upon publication, but has been corrected to “Khanal.”