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Climate Change in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of climate change news 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 climate change, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, climate change took 22.94 of every 10,000 news articles in 2025, 41.67% less than its share of 39.33 per 10,000 in 2019, although the raw number of climate change articles rose from 46,442 to 61,912 over the same years.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, complete years 2019–2025 (trends are expressed per 10,000 articles because the index grew).
In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change took a 44.32% smaller share of news coverage than in 2019 (21.9 against 39.33 articles per 10,000 news articles), the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025, before recovering to 38.02 per 10,000 in 2021.
Basis: Annual climate change articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year.
November 2021, the month of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, was the month in which climate change took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 73.78 articles per 10,000, ahead of September 2019 (66.93) and October 2021 (62.36).
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Between 2019 and 2025, an average of 30.23% of each year's climate change news appeared in September, October and November, against 25% if coverage were spread evenly; November, the month in which most of the period's UN climate conferences took place, held the largest share (11.3%) and February the least (7.02%).
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025 (within-year shares survive changes in outlet mix).
Of climate change articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 44.5% were negative in tone, 1.32 times the 33.6% negative share across all news; negative articles outnumbered positive ones in 2019 (27,623 against 18,473) but not in 2025 (27,348 against 33,382).
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 | 30,293 | 33.55% | 0.69 |
| India | 8,448 | 9.36% | 0.71 |
| United Kingdom | 5,600 | 6.2% | 1.06 |
| United Arab Emirates | 3,358 | 3.72% | 5.71 |
| Australia | 3,330 | 3.69% | 1.72 |
| France | 2,896 | 3.21% | 1.62 |
| Canada | 2,886 | 3.2% | 1.49 |
| China | 2,623 | 2.9% | 1.1 |
| Brazil | 1,618 | 1.79% | 2.07 |
| Germany | 1,604 | 1.78% | 1.51 |
| Nigeria | 1,425 | 1.58% | 1.15 |
| Azerbaijan | 1,335 | 1.48% | 45.14 |
| New Zealand | 1,220 | 1.35% | 2.09 |
| Spain | 1,074 | 1.19% | 1.22 |
| Singapore | 1,023 | 1.13% | 1.27 |
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 "climate change" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Climate Change in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/climate-change/