Hyderabad: A shopkeeper in Chennai closes his stall as temperatures cross 48 degrees. A farmer in Telangana watches floodwaters destroy his crops for the third year running. A mother in Bengaluru rushes her child to the hospital with dengue.
These stories play out across India every day, yet newspapers connect them to climate change in fewer than one article out of every 1,000 published.
Coverage of climate change is appallingly low
Researchers examined 25,848 articles from six leading Indian publications between 2012 and 2023. They found climate change appeared in just 0.38 per cent of all news stories.
Among those rare climate articles, only 5.8 per cent mentioned health impacts. The study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, compared coverage across three countries and placed India at the bottom for linking climate to human wellbeing.
The numbers reveal a stark picture.
Out of the initial climate articles, researchers identified 1,487 that contained health keywords. After a detailed review, only 137 articles substantively focused on climate health connections. “This is less than 0.1 per cent of India’s total news coverage over a decade,” the authors noted.
Why is there a gap between coverage and reality?
The disconnect appears when you step outside and look around.
India records some of the highest heat-related mortality globally. Pollution kills over a million Indians annually, with fossil fuels driving much of this mortality. Himalayan glaciers melt and trigger floods that devastate entire communities. Dengue and malaria spread into areas where they never existed before, tracking changes in temperature and rainfall patterns.
Yet these connections remain invisible in mainstream newspapers.
The study examined articles from The Hindu, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Economic Times, Deccan Herald and the Press Trust of India.
These outlets shape how millions understand the world around them. Their silence on climate health links means readers miss the connection between the heatwave that kills their neighbour and the emissions from coal plants, between the dengue outbreak in their city and shifting weather patterns, between the flood that destroys homes and the warming atmosphere that holds more water.
Researchers used online databases to collect articles, searching headlines and lead paragraphs for both climate change and public health keywords. They cast a wide net initially, then narrowed their focus through manual validation. The process revealed how surface mentions often disguise the absence of meaningful coverage.
What makes it into print?
When Indian newspapers do cover climate and health together, they stick to vague territory. Articles mention ‘public health risks’ or ‘diseases’ without specifying what that means for someone living in Bhopal, Kolkata or Bengaluru.
The research identified patterns.
The top categories included general references to public health impacts, extreme heat and heat stroke, extreme weather disasters and air pollution-related illness. But mentions of vector-borne diseases, water-borne illnesses, food insecurity or mental health impacts remained minimal, despite these posing major risks across the country.
Results showed that almost all articles substantively focused on climate health reported at least one impact.
“The top five reported public health impacts were general references to public health impacts without specifying a particular health harm,” the study noted, followed by climate-related events associated with specific health harms.
Abstract language dominated
One pattern emerged clearly.
Newspapers preferred abstract language over concrete examples. A headline might warn that "public health at risk", but the story never explains which health, whose risk, or what people can do about it.
The invisible victims
The study found that just around one-fourth of Indian articles identified vulnerable groups. When newspapers did specify who suffers most, they mentioned regions like coastal states or Himalayan areas, or demographics like children and the elderly.
Socioeconomic groups vanished from coverage.
“The most referenced categories were regions and demographic groups. However, socioeconomic groups such as low-income families, slum dwellers, and outdoor workers received very little attention, even though they bear the brunt of India’s climate impacts,” researchers found.
A construction worker in Ahmedabad might work through 45-degree heat because missing a day means his family goes hungry. A woman in a Kolkata slum might wade through contaminated floodwater to reach her job. A farmer in Maharashtra might watch his crops fail for the third consecutive year. These stories exist everywhere, but newspapers tell them without connecting them to the larger climate crisis.
The study noted that reporting on vulnerable groups did not increase over the decade examined, suggesting no progress in addressing this gap.
Solutions remain scarce
Researchers uncovered another troubling pattern.
Less than half the articles discussing climate health impacts explored potential solutions. This follows trends seen globally, where the media emphasises threats without highlighting responses.
When solutions did appear, they focused narrowly on political action and energy sources, with transportation, consumption, and community initiatives receiving minimal attention. The constant political framing risks turning a humanitarian and scientific issue into partisan territory.
“Although most news coverage acknowledges the impacts of climate change, only about half of the articles explored potential solutions,” the authors observed.
“This gap reflects a broader global trend in media, which tends to emphasise climate threats without equally highlighting actionable solutions.”
The researchers noted this approach can leave audiences feeling powerless. “Such reporting can leave the public feeling disempowered and disconnected,” they wrote, suggesting journalists incorporate more solutions-focused coverage.
Missing voices
Health experts appeared in just over one-third of the articles analysed. The study found that 199 articles included at least one expert source, with organisational sources showing up more frequently than individual experts.
“Notably, the incorporation of any type of source varied substantially by country, suggesting that journalistic practices and sourcing standards might differ across borders,” researchers observed.
This matters because trusted voices help people understand connections between climate and health. The study pointed out that many official health department websites also lack comprehensive climate health information, creating an information vacuum that newspapers could fill but largely do not.
The authors suggested a clear path forward: “Journalists can better integrate public health perspectives into climate change reporting by using public health experts as sources and routinely linking the reporting of climate change impacts, such as extreme weather events, migration, and food shortages, to their immediate and long-term health impacts.”
Why patterns persist
The research team drew their sample randomly but systematically. They collected articles from five mainstream newspapers and one news agency for each country between January 2012 and December 2023. A detailed content analysis was conducted on a randomly selected 20 per cent of articles containing both climate and health keywords.
The validation process strengthened the findings but also exposed how easily keywords can mislead. An article might mention climate change in one paragraph and health in another, without exploring how they relate. Many articles containing both sets of keywords did not actually connect the two topics substantively.
“Although some articles included both climate and health-related keywords, only a small fraction were substantively focused on the public health relevance of climate change,” the study noted.
China showed the highest percentage of climate coverage each year in the comparative analysis, followed by the United States and India. The proportion of stories mentioning climate increased sharply across all three countries, particularly in 2015 during the Paris Agreement, 2018 following extreme weather events, and 2021 as pandemic coverage receded.
But India lagged consistently in connecting climate to health outcomes, even as the country experiences intensifying heatwaves, worsening air pollution, dengue outbreaks, and catastrophic floods.
