Kamal Ghorui
BENGALURU: Bengaluru: At a time when climate change is increasingly reshaping public health risks across the globe, Indian media has quietly carved out a leadership role in linking the two. A new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health has found that Indian news outlets are emerging as global frontrunners in climate-health journalism, surpassing coverage trends in both the United States and China. According to the research, Indian outlets — including The Times of India — recorded the highest proportion of substantive climate-health coverage at 46.4 per cent, compared to 31.3 per cent in the US and 17 per cent in China.The study, titled ‘The evolution of news coverage about climate change as a health issue: a decadal analysis in China, India, and the USA’, examined legacy media coverage across the three countries between 2012 and 2023. Researchers conducted a manual content analysis of articles from five mainstream newspapers and one news agency per country, sourced through archival databases. In India, The Times of India was among the five newspapers included in the sample.
Climate-health journalism was defined as news content that substantively connects climate change to human health outcomes or health-related actions, including specific health impacts, vulnerable populations, solutions with health co-benefits, and the use of health expert sources. Researchers, to identify the relevant articles, screened headlines and lead paragraphs for climate-related keywords such as “climate change” and “global warming.” These articles were then cross-searched for public health terms including health, disease, death, illness, injury, infection and wellbeing. This process generated 5,173 potentially relevant articles — 1,473 from China, 1,487 from India and 2,213 from the US. After systematic sampling and manual validation, the final dataset comprised 324 articles: 50 from China and 137 each from India and the US.Interestingly, while only 5.8 per cent of India’s climate-related articles contained public-health keywords — lower than the US (7.3 per cent) and significantly below China (18.6 per cent) — manual validation revealed that China’s higher keyword overlap did not translate into stronger health-focused storytelling. In contrast, India’s smaller but more selectively framed pool demonstrated greater editorial intent in centring public-health implications.The study noted that Indian media consistently performed better in covering issues that directly affect everyday life — including heat, food security, air quality and extreme weather. Indian outlets were most successful (91 percent) in framing climate change as a broad public-health threat, compared with 72 percent in China and 66 percent in the US. Coverage in India more frequently linked floods and extreme weather events to health impacts and drew clearer connections between climate change, food security and wellbeing.Deepti Ganapathy from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM-B), one of the study’s authors, said India’s strength lay in the consistency of its reporting, noting there had been no significant upsurge or decline in recent years. “This is good, as consistency is the key to driving health communication to all stakeholders involved. In the ‘Most frequently reported health impacts’, Indian media showed a higher awareness in reporting about ‘General Public health issues’, compared to the US and China,” she said.Despite the positive trends, Ganapathy emphasised that climate-health coverage remains limited worldwide. “In this study, we assess both the frequency and the framing of newspaper coverage in the world’s 3 leading carbon-emitting countries. Although our study found some cross-national differences in the prevalence and type of reporting, the most striking finding is how little attention the health implications of climate receive. Despite well-documented links between climate change and health and the demonstrable efficacy of this framing for engagement, only a tiny fraction of news coverage connects the 2,” she said.Deepti added that solution-oriented reporting, inclusion of under-represented voices, stronger evidence-based sourcing and policy-focused narratives could further strengthen climate-health journalism. The study also recommended increasing the presence of health experts in coverage, noting that nearly two-thirds of climate-health articles lacked expert voices altogether.
