Droughts and Floods Attract Little Media Attention University of Bonn study analyzes international reporting on natural disasters

Three factors—spectacular images, a high death toll and strong personal ties—make it more likely that the media in one country will report on a natural disaster in another, according to a study by the University of Bonn, the University of Warwick and Imperial College London, which has now been published in the journal “Nature Human Behaviour.” The data also shows that droughts and flooding—two of the biggest effects of climate change—are considered particularly un-newsworthy, which could be one explanation for why many people are still underestimating the impact of the greenhouse effect.

For their work, the researchers evaluated data from the Europe Media Monitor, an EU Commission database that produces a daily record of the stories printed in 20,000 news sources from 190 countries all over the world. “We asked ourselves which natural disasters attract cross-border media coverage,” explains Professor Thiemo Fetzer from the Department of Economics at the University of Bonn and the Economics Department at the University of Warwick. “So we focused on all the disasters since 2016 that had been officially recorded—over 2,600 of them in total.”

The researchers’ analysis produced three rules that appear to hold true worldwide: The media are particularly likely to report on sudden catastrophes that are accompanied by dramatic images, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches or forest fires. Second, the more lives these events claim, the likelier it is that they will be covered in other countries.

Personal connections are key

“The third striking factor is the major role played by social connections with the country affected,” Fetzer says. “Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with geographical proximity or similarity of language. Instead, we found evidence that it’s primarily a question of strong personal ties.”

One clue to this link is provided by the “Social Connectedness Index,” which is calculated based on the number of Facebook friendships that exist between two countries (relative to their total populations). How similar the two populations are at a DNA level also plays a role. In other words, the more genetic material that people in two different countries share on average, the more likely the media in one country are to cover natural disasters in the other.

“We believe that, rather than being the actual cause of this finding, genetic similarity serves as an indication of close personal ties that have developed for e.g. historical reasons,” Fetzer reveals. For example, some 1.5 million people emigrated to America from Ireland during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, meaning that there are closer genetic matches between the people of Ireland and the US today than there would otherwise have been.

Personal ties foster greater empathy

“Personal ties ensure more interest and also more empathy,” Fetzer says. The size of this effect can be illustrated by working out the media response to a hypothetical natural disaster based on the interrelationships identified in the study. According to the study data, the German media would treat a storm in Mexico that killed 62 people in a similar way to one in Bangladesh that claimed 100 lives—despite Bangladesh being closer to us geographically.

Fetzer thinks that this phenomenon also shows how important personal connections are to the fight against threats like climate change. This is because, as we all know, global challenges of this magnitude need the global community to all be pulling together in combating them.

However, many consequences of the greenhouse effect are seemingly having a hard time getting into the international headlines. Droughts are generally only covered by the media in the countries where they hit, for instance, and it is a similar story with floods, which likewise attract less international interest than, say, avalanches or earthquakes. “This makes it easier to ignore the consequences of global heating, at least until they arrive on our own doorsteps,” Fetzer concludes.

Institutions involved and funding secured:

The University of Bonn, the University of Warwick and Imperial College London were involved in the study. The work was funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize in economics, a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).

Publication: Thiemo Fetzer and Prashant Garg: “Uneven Patterns of Cross-Border Media Coverage Following Natural Disasters”, in: “Nature Human Behaviour,” DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02512-6. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02512-6