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Water Pollution in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of news about water pollution 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 the pollution of rivers, lakes, the sea, groundwater or drinking water, including sewage spills and oil spills. Each row carries 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, water pollution took 3.2 of every 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 1.98 in 2025, a 38.1% smaller share of the news; the share fell to 2.0 per 10,000 in 2020 and did not regain its 2019 level in any later complete year.
Basis: Annual counts of 36,432 matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, complete years 2019–2025 (shares, not raw counts, because the index grew).
October 2021, the month of the oil spill off Orange County, California, was the month in which water pollution took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 5.8 articles per 10,000.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
August 2020, the month of the MV Wakashio oil spill off Mauritius, was one of four months between January 2019 and July 2026 in which water pollution took more than 4 of every 10,000 news articles (4.08), against 2.0 for the year 2020 as a whole.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles; the other three such months were October 2021 (5.8), January 2026 (5.51) and January 2022 (4.85).
Of 36,432 news articles about water pollution between January 2019 and July 2026, 26.5% named an oil spill in their opening sentences, nearly twice the 14.3% that used the phrase "water pollution" itself.
Basis: Term counts within the matched set: 9,638 openings with "oil spill" and 5,211 with "water pollution"; an article can match several terms.
Of water-pollution articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 67.9% were negative in tone, 2.02 times the 33.6% negative share across all news, and 88.4% were rated critical priority, 2.08 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top sentiment label and top priority label of each article; critical = priority 7 or higher on a 1–9 scale; 99.6% of sampled articles carry a tone 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 | 2,718 | 31.65% | 0.65 |
| India | 1,962 | 22.84% | 1.73 |
| United Kingdom | 871 | 10.14% | 1.74 |
| Nigeria | 328 | 3.82% | 2.79 |
| New Zealand | 244 | 2.84% | 4.39 |
| Japan | 208 | 2.42% | 2.28 |
| Philippines | 187 | 2.18% | 6.9 |
| Singapore | 168 | 1.96% | 2.2 |
| Canada | 156 | 1.82% | 0.85 |
| Russia | 118 | 1.37% | 1.82 |
| Australia | 116 | 1.35% | 0.63 |
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 "water pollution" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Water Pollution in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/water-pollution/