All datasets › Environment
Carbon Emissions in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of news about carbon dioxide and greenhouse-gas emissions from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about carbon emissions, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
Download
Data-platform copies are being published; links appear here as they go live.
Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, November 2021, the month of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, was the month in which carbon emissions took their largest share of the news, at 21.2 articles per 10,000 news articles, 1.6 times the 2021 annual average of 13.25.
Basis: Monthly articles whose opening text names carbon, CO2 or greenhouse-gas emissions, divided by all articles in the index for the same month; October 2021 was second (20.23 per 10,000).
The share of news devoted to carbon emissions rose 1.72-fold from 2020 to 2021, to 13.25 articles per 10,000, its highest annual level between 2019 and 2025, and then fell by 38.2% to 8.19 per 10,000 in 2025.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year (145,200 matched articles, January 2019 – July 2026).
In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, carbon emissions took a 14.4% smaller share of news coverage than in 2019 (7.71 against 9.01 articles per 10,000 news articles), before rising to 13.25 per 10,000 in 2021.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year; the raw count rose (10,634 to 12,509) while the index grew faster.
Between 2019 and 2025, November carried the largest share of each year's carbon-emissions news (10.09% on average), and September to November together carried 28.41%, against 25% for an even spread across the year.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
Of carbon-emissions articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 70.5% were positive in tone, 1.24 times the 56.8% positive share across all news, while 27.7% were negative against 33.6% for all news.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.8% of sampled articles carry a label.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 9,965 | 32.89% | 0.68 |
| United Kingdom | 2,970 | 9.8% | 1.68 |
| India | 2,296 | 7.58% | 0.57 |
| China | 1,513 | 4.99% | 1.9 |
| France | 1,195 | 3.94% | 2.0 |
| Australia | 1,091 | 3.6% | 1.68 |
| Canada | 1,071 | 3.53% | 1.65 |
| Germany | 917 | 3.03% | 2.57 |
| United Arab Emirates | 668 | 2.2% | 3.38 |
| Singapore | 654 | 2.16% | 2.42 |
| Japan | 581 | 1.92% | 1.8 |
| Brazil | 438 | 1.45% | 1.67 |
| New Zealand | 407 | 1.34% | 2.08 |
| Nigeria | 393 | 1.3% | 0.95 |
| Switzerland | 292 | 0.96% | 2.22 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "carbon emissions" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Carbon Emissions in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/carbon-emissions/