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Air Pollution in the News, 2019–2026: Seasonality, Geography and Tone of Global Air Pollution Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We measure how air pollution was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 96,198 de-duplicated air pollution articles, and set that coverage beside 56,508 research papers and 13,013 patent families on air pollution. Six results stand out: Seasonality. On average 22.47% of each year's air pollution coverage appears in November, and 44.79% in October, November and December. Attention, not air quality. November was the peak month in every year from 2019 to 2024. The share of news taken by air pollution was 36% lower in 2025 than in 2019 (5.99 against 9.36 per 10,000), even as raw article counts rose. Geography. Between January 2023 and July 2026, India accounted for 63.83% of located air pollution news, 4.84 times its share of all located news. The United States is under-represented at 0.33. Thailand (5.78), Bangladesh (2.84) and Nepal (2.63) are also over-represented. Within India, Delhi leads (5.17), followed by Haryana (1.38); within the United States, Colorado (2.37), California (2.36) and Maryland (2.26). Tone and urgency. 67% of air pollution articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 84.4% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Measurement. 11.08% of raw matches for air pollution vocabulary were automated alerts, weather-page templates, cryptocurrency items or figurative uses. Research and invention. Air pollution papers grew from 4.98 to 9.4 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025. As a share of all patent families, air pollution patents peaked in 2017 (3.01 per 10,000) and fell to 2.21 in 2024. China's office holds 80.3% of the filing-office records from 2015 to 2024.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23446333
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222882242
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