Uneven patterns of cross-border media coverage following natural disasters
2026-08-14
Many natural disasters central to climate-policy debates are hydro-meteorological hazards, yet it remains unclear how media attention is distributed across disaster types. Using 135 million news articles from 466 sources in 123 countries since 2016, we estimated cross-border reporting changes after disasters. Attention rises but is highly uneven (95% confidence intervals are shown in parentheses after the estimates): short-run increases are largest following earthquakes ( β = 0.0785 (0.0758, 0.0812)), dry-mass movements ( β = 0.0531 (0.0349, 0.0713)) and volcanic eruptions ( β = 0.0425 (0.0359, 0.0490)), and smaller for floods ( β = 0.0069 (0.0062, 0.0076)) and droughts ( β = 0.0001 (−0.0036, 0.0039)). Conditional on severity and duration, hydro-meteorological disasters receive less attention than geophysical disasters ( θ = −0.0065 (−0.0115, −0.0015)). Coverage is higher for 100+ versus 0–9 deaths ( β = 0.0360 (0.0231, 0.0490)), with stronger fatality gradients for country pairs with tighter social ties ( β = 0.1498 (0.0822, 0.2174)) and ancestral relatedness ( β = 0.2965 (0.1887, 0.4043)).