The New York Times is disbanding its environmental desk and reassigning its reporters and editors to other departments, a Times spokeswoman told TheWrap.

The change is "purely in structure," similar to the dismantling of the education desk last year, and does not underscore the paper's budgetary woes, Eileen Murphy, vice president of corporate communications at the Times, said.

"The idea is that environmental stories, like education stories, are partly national or foreign, or partly economic, etc., and it makes sense to have reporters on all relevant desks covering a range of environmental issues," Murphy said.

Seven reporters and two editors worked exclusively on the environmental desk.

The shift comes just over a week after the Daily Climate [5] environmental blog reported that the number of stories about climate change in global media coverage decreased by 2 percent -- falling to its lowest since United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen collapsed in 2009.