Natural Disasters in the News, 2019–2026: Seasonality, Geography and Tone of Global Coverage of Natural Disasters and Disaster Management, and How It Compares with Research and Invention
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We measure how natural disasters and disaster management were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 80,169 de-duplicated articles that use the general vocabulary of disasters. We set that coverage beside 20,032 research papers and 4,642 patent families on the same subject. Six results stand out: Seasonality. On average 31.36% of each year's coverage appears in July, August and September. August is the busiest month (11.0%) and April the quietest (6.7%). Attention, not occurrence. The topic took a 30.2% smaller share of news in 2020 than in 2019. Its share peaked in October 2024, the month Hurricane Milton struck Florida, at 9.42 articles per 10,000. Geography. India's share of located coverage is 2.79 times its share of all news, and the United States' is 0.54 times. Afghanistan (9.94), Indonesia (8.62) and Nepal (6.75) are the most over-represented countries. Within India, the Himalayan states lead: Sikkim (8.49), Himachal Pradesh (7.2) and Uttarakhand (5.04). Within the United States, Hawaii (15.88) leads by far. Tone and urgency. 53.6% of articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 78.9% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Measurement. Exclusion patterns removed 8.68% of raw matches, aimed at pandemic orders under disaster-management law, IT "disaster recovery" products and unrelated incidents. The pandemic exclusion also lowers the 2020 share, so the 2020 low is partly a product of the matching rule. Research and invention. Papers on the topic grew from 2.43 to 3.64 per 10,000 papers from 2015 to 2025. Patent families grew 5.33-fold from 2015 to 2024, and China's office held 74.3% of office filings.
Author: Kumar, Narendra
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222879084
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