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Drought in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of drought 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 drought, 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, drought coverage was only mildly seasonal: August carried the largest share of a typical year's drought articles (11.4%) and December the smallest (6.06%), and July to September together held 30.08% against 25% for an even spread.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles in each complete year 2019–2025, averaged over the seven years.
Drought took a 38.3% smaller share of news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (4.77 against 7.73 articles per 10,000 news articles), the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025, in the year coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic expanded.
Basis: Annual drought articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year.
August 2022, the month of the 2022 European drought, was the month in which drought took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 27.88 articles per 10,000, and drought's share of located French news rose from 2.33 per 10,000 in 2019 to 35.85 in 2022.
Basis: Monthly drought articles per 10,000 news articles; for France, drought articles per 10,000 of all located French articles per year.
Drought's share of global news fell from 10.4 articles per 10,000 in 2022 to 5.39 in 2025, a 48.2% decline that left it 30.3% below its 2019 level, even though raw drought article counts were 1.59 times higher in 2025 than in 2019.
Basis: Annual drought articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2019–2025.
Of drought articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 58.7% were negative in tone, 1.75 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.6% 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 | 9,831 | 43.65% | 0.9 |
| India | 1,862 | 8.27% | 0.63 |
| Australia | 896 | 3.98% | 1.86 |
| Brazil | 780 | 3.46% | 4.01 |
| United Kingdom | 741 | 3.29% | 0.56 |
| France | 638 | 2.83% | 1.44 |
| Spain | 624 | 2.77% | 2.84 |
| Canada | 407 | 1.81% | 0.84 |
| China | 386 | 1.71% | 0.65 |
| Kenya | 353 | 1.57% | 7.14 |
| Italy | 260 | 1.15% | 1.19 |
| New Zealand | 219 | 0.97% | 1.5 |
| South Africa | 204 | 0.91% | 2.0 |
| Mexico | 196 | 0.87% | 2.82 |
| Zimbabwe | 187 | 0.83% | 24.8 |
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 "drought" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Drought in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/drought/