Uneven Patterns of Cross-Border Media Coverage Following Natural Disasters

Many natural disasters central to climate-policy debates are hydro-meteorological hazards, yet it remains unclear how global media attention is distributed across disaster types. Using a dataset of 466 news sources from 123 countries, covering 135 million news articles since 2016, we apply an event study framework to measure cross-border reporting following natural disasters. Cross-border attention rises after disasters but is highly uneven across hazards, with the largest short-run increases following earthquakes (b = 0.0785, 95% CI [0.0758, 0.0812]), dry-mass movements (b = 0.0531, 95% CI [0.0349, 0.0713]), and volcanic eruptions (b = 0.0425, 95% CI [0.0359, 0.0490]). In contrast, climatologically salient hazards such as floods (b = 0.0069, 95% CI [0.0062, 0.0076]) and droughts (b = 0.0001, 95% CI [−0.0036, 0.0039]) receive substantially less coverage. Conditional on severity and duration, hydro-meteorological (“climate-linked”) disasters receive less cross-border attention than geophysical disasters (θ = −0.0065, 95% CI [−0.0115, −0.0015]). Attention also increases with fatalities: disasters with 100+ deaths receive more coverage than those with 0–9 deaths (b = 0.0360, 95% CI [0.0231, 0.0490]), and this fatality gradient is stronger for country pairs with tighter social ties and deeper ancestral links. These patterns highlight systematic cross-border differences in attention to disaster risks.