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Natural Disasters in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of news on natural disasters and disaster management 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 that uses the general vocabulary of natural disasters, such as "natural disaster", "disaster management" or "disaster relief". Each row has 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, an average of 31.36% of each year's coverage using the vocabulary of natural disasters and disaster management was published in July, August and September, against 25% if coverage were spread evenly, with August the busiest month (11.0%) and April the quietest (6.7%).
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
Natural disasters and disaster management took a 30.2% smaller share of news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (4.2 against 6.02 articles per 10,000 news articles), the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025, and the share rose 26.4% from 2022 to 2023 to reach its highest annual level of the period (6.22 per 10,000).
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year; articles that mention COVID-19 or lockdowns are excluded from the match.
October 2024, the month Hurricane Milton struck Florida while recovery from Hurricane Helene continued, was the month in which natural disasters and disaster management took their largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 9.42 articles per 10,000.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Of articles on natural disasters and disaster management carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 53.6% were negative in tone, 1.6 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; 99.7% of sampled articles carry a label.
Priority ratings assigned by the index placed 78.9% of articles on natural disasters and disaster management at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.85 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| India | 9,543 | 36.78% | 2.79 |
| United States | 6,802 | 26.21% | 0.54 |
| Indonesia | 622 | 2.4% | 8.62 |
| Philippines | 508 | 1.96% | 6.21 |
| Australia | 504 | 1.94% | 0.91 |
| Turkey | 492 | 1.9% | 5.97 |
| Japan | 451 | 1.74% | 1.64 |
| Pakistan | 438 | 1.69% | 3.72 |
| China | 413 | 1.59% | 0.6 |
| Nigeria | 342 | 1.32% | 0.96 |
| Nepal | 316 | 1.22% | 6.75 |
| Spain | 239 | 0.92% | 0.94 |
| United Kingdom | 238 | 0.92% | 0.16 |
| Ghana | 234 | 0.9% | 1.87 |
| Afghanistan | 213 | 0.82% | 9.94 |
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 "natural disaster" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Natural Disasters in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/natural-disasters/