The Clock is Ticking: Forty Seconds to Explain the Climate Crisis

The summer of 2026 burned the largest wildfire in Spain's recorded history and the largest France has seen since the Second World War. June's heat killed more than 10,000 people across Europe. A heat dome held North Africa and the Sahel above 45°C for days. In Assam, the Brahmaputra put 700,000 people out of their homes.

But it was in the United States, in its hottest month in 132 years of records, that climate reporting found its biggest audience of the summer, in the least likely slot imaginable.

Footballers at the FIFA Men's World Cup had to stop mid-half to drink, cool down and put on ice vests. Two US broadcasters held the rights to those three minutes. One sold them to advertisers. The other used them to explain why the players were stopping at all.

This week Christiana Figueres speaks with Vanessa Hauc, Emmy award-winning anchor at Noticias Telemundo and creator of its climate unit, Planeta Tierra. Vanessa got Telemundo to hand her time during the hydration breaks. Forty seconds, Saudi Aramco's branding in shot, to tell viewers why the players needed to stop. While competitors sold advertising slots generating an estimated $1bn globally, millions tuned in to Vanessa explaining how human-driven climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels, was responsible for the crisis.

Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson join Christiana to pick apart why simply reporting a hotter world is still treated as a provocation, and the three of them take stock of a summer of record heat, Spain's tumbling power prices and the case for telling the economic story better.

What does it take to reach people who will never open a scientific paper but will not miss a match? And why is telling it like it is still the risky option?

Plus, a first look at the next three episodes. Tom has been somewhere that holds the best and the worst of this transition at once. Stay tuned for the end of the episode.

Learn More

⚽ Read Climate Change Big Player at FIFA World Cup 2026, the World Weather Attribution study Vanessa's team built the reporting on

📺 Watch Noticias Telemundo Planeta Tierra, the only Spanish-language environmental news programme streaming in the US, created and directed by Vanessa

📰 Read The World Cup Story (Almost) No One Told from Covering Climate Now, on how Telemundo became the only US broadcaster to connect the hydration breaks to a warming planet

🗳️ Explore NRDC's polling with Latino Decisions, which found nine in ten Latinos want government action on climate

🌡️ Understand why Latino neighbourhoods carry the heaviest heat burden, UCLA research showing more than twice the share of workers in heat-exposed jobs like agriculture and construction

⚡ Get up to date on Ember analysis’s about how Spain decoupled its electricity prices from gas

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Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

Edited by: Miles Martignoni

Show Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan

Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

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