arXiv 13 Jan 2025 · General Economics
arXiv:2501.07615 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of natural disasters worldwide. Media coverage of these events may be vital to generate empathy and mobilize global populations to address the common threat posed by climate change. 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 media activity following natural disasters. Our results shows that while media attention rises after disasters, it is heavily skewed towards certain events, notably earthquakes, accidents, and wildfires. In contrast, climatologically salient events such as floods, droughts, or extreme temperatures receive less coverage. This cross-border disaster reporting is strongly related to the number of deaths associated with the event, especially when the affected populations share strong social ties or genetic similarities with those in the reporting country. Achieving more balanced media coverage across different types of natural disasters may be essential to counteract skewed perceptions. Further, fostering closer social connections between countries may enhance empathy and mobilize the resources necessary to confront the global threat of climate change.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hoffman (2001) Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice, Cambridge University Press | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 2 | Beck (2009) World at risk, Polity | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 3 | Pelegrino, Spolaore \ Wacziarg (2024) `Barriers to global capital allocation', Quarterly Journal of Economics | 0.644 | 4 | 1 | 100% |
| 4 | Atkinson \ Van der Goot (2009) Near real time information mining in multilingual news, in `Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web',… | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Batson (2011) Altruism in Humans, Oxford University Press | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Below, Wirtz \ Guha-Sapir (2009) `Disaster category classification and peril terminology for operational purposes', Working Paper | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Boykoff (2009) `We speak for the trees: Media reporting on the environment', Annual review of Environment and Resources 34(1), 431–457 | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | Coumou \ Rahmstorf (2012) `A decade of weather extremes', Nature climate change 2(7), 491–496 | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 9 | Decety \ Cowell (2014) `The complex relation between morality and empathy', Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18(7), 337–339 | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 10 | Doulton \ Brown (2009) `Ten years to prevent catastrophe?: Discourses of climate change and international development in the uk press', Global Environm… | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 75 scored citations.