Lisbon, Aug. 14, 2025 (Lusa) - Media coverage of climate change is trapped in a ‘vicious cycle’ that begins with public inaction and undermines the mobilisation of society against misinformation, a study by an Oxford University institute released on Thursday has concluded.

‘New climate technologies comprise a large part of the media's climate coverage, but newsrooms generally fail to relate the potential of new climate technologies to the urgency of the climate crisis,’ according to the study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.

The researchers say that climate coverage ‘is trapped in a vicious cycle’, which begins with the inaction of the population, which is unwilling to reduce its consumption. At the same time, there is still a public push for climate action.

Contributing to this cycle is how the media covers climate change, which does not offer a hopeful climate narrative or possible solutions or measures to combat the problem.

Recently, in an interview with Lusa, Alice Fonseca, a climate and policy specialist from the international environmental organisation World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Portugal, said that the fight against climate disinformation is compromised because people don't think it's worth fighting climate change.

The WWF representative said that ‘people recognise the problem, they think it's important to act, but they also recognise that they are acting in a context where decision-making is very difficult, because there is a lot of difficulty in understanding whether the information is true or not’.

For Alice Fonseca, this is a phenomenon of paralysis, because if people feel that they are given a lot of worrying information, but are not presented with proposals on how to act and combat the problem, they consider ‘that it's not worth doing anything’.

PYR/ADB // ADB.

Lusa