This summer, the climate crisis has been impossible to miss.
By Helen Clarkson, CEO, Climate Group
Wildfires have torn through Canada, Washington state, western Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa. Heavy monsoon rains have brought severe flooding to India. A typhoon has triggered flooding across China. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced. Thousands of excess deaths have been linked to heat in Europe, where the damage bill already runs into billions of euros.
And more extreme weather is building. In the Pacific, roughly between Ecuador and New Zealand, sea surface temperatures are climbing fast. As climate scientist Zeke Hausfather put it: "The rise in Niño 3.4 region sea surface temperatures over the past few weeks has been nothing short of astonishing. We are now hotter than any days during the 1997/1998 super El Niño event, and we are still many months from the peak." The link between El Niño and climate change isn’t fully clear, but we do know El Niño can amplify the impacts we’re already living through.
By any measure, this is a huge story. But too often it isn’t being told as a climate story.
The story we’re not telling
In June, the UK recorded its hottest month on record. More than 70% of newspaper articles covering that heatwave didn’t mention climate change at all. Net zero, the solution, was mentioned even less, except by outlets using the moment to spread misinformation about electric vehicles and solar.
This isn’t a one-off. Between 2021 and 2025, mentions of “climate change” and “global warming” in the media fell by 38%. You can see it in the smaller choices too: news outlets running stories about warming seas alongside cheerful photos of people on the beach.
We’re watching the language disappear from the story, even as the story itself gets worse.
And it’s not just the media
Companies are following the same trend of going quiet. We know progress is still happening. Registrations for Climate Week NYC are up. Event numbers are up too.
But public announcements are down. Companies are still acting, but they’re quieter about calling it climate action. We’ve started hearing different versions of the same line: “We can still do the same, we just don’t need to talk about climate.”
We call this greenhushing, and it’s a mistake. Progress slows without accountability, and without the learning and collaboration that comes from being open about what you’re doing and why. And if the media story tells us anything, it’s that silence doesn’t stay neutral. It gets filled by someone else’s narrative.
Why silence is the problem
Climate action is a collective action problem. The data consistently shows that people care about the climate. But people also consistently believe that other people don’t. And when we think no one else is doing anything, that belief becomes self-reinforcing. Nothing happens because everyone assumes nothing is happening.
Every time we go quiet, whether that’s a media outlet dropping the word “climate” from a heatwave story or a company staying silent about its progress away from polluting energy, we feed that assumption. We make the problem feel bigger and the response feel smaller than they really are.
The other half of the story
None of this should obscure the other major trend of the moment: the speed of clean technology deployment. Solar PV and electric vehicles are scaling faster than almost anyone predicted a few years ago, with China leading much of that curve. As we head into Climate Week NYC, the question isn’t whether the technology works. It’s how the rest of the world matches that pace without being left behind.
Why this year’s theme is Energy. Impact. Action.
Taken together, these are the trends that matter most heading into Climate Week NYC 2026: intensifying impacts, a media narrative that is quietly disconnecting from the climate story, and an action story that is real but too often untold.
That’s why this year’s theme is Energy. Impact. Action. Energy for the shift from fossil fuels to clean power, and how fast we can move it. Impact for the outcomes that matter. Action for change that lasts.
Talking about climate isn’t the point. It’s what makes everything else possible. Naming what we’re doing as climate action, rather than hushing it up, is what lets others learn from it, build on it and move faster because of it.
That’s exactly what Climate Week NYC is for. Not talking for its own sake, and not just pointing to the media’s blind spots, but creating the space to work out strategy together, share what’s working, learn from what isn’t and keep the pressure on together.
Join us in New York City, September 20-27, 2026.
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