India ahead of U.S., China in linking climate change to health risks in news coverage: Study

Indian news outlets carry the highest proportion of substantive climate–health coverage among India, the United States and China, according to a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal. However, the researchers caution that overall coverage of linking climate change and public health remains extremely limited across all three countries. 

The study, titled The evolution of news coverage about climate change as a health issue – a decadal analysis in China, India, and the USA, was co-authored by Professor Deepti Ganapathy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Management Communication at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM-B), along with international collaborators. It analyses how leading newspapers in the world’s three largest carbon-emitting nations have covered the health impact of climate change over an 11-year period from 2012 to 2023. 

Drawing from a dataset of more than 22.5 million newspaper articles published during the time period, the researchers first identified stories that mentioned climate change. These accounted for just 0.3% of the total corpus.

From this subset, articles that also referred to health were further screened and manually coded to assess whether they substantively discussed climate change as a public health issue rather than making a passing reference.  

The results show that fewer than 0.1% of all published articles across the three countries over the 11 years provided substantive coverage of climate change in relation to health. Even among climate-focused stories, explicit discussion of health impact was uncommon. However, within this limited pool of coverage, Indian newspapers stood out. In a validated sample, 46.4% of Indian articles that mentioned both climate change and health were found to substantively frame the issue through a public health lens. This compares with 31.3% in the United States and 17% in China. 

The study found that the most frequently discussed health impacts included extreme heat, extreme weather events, such as floods and storms, air pollution, food insecurity, and broader public health risks. Indian coverage was more likely to connect climate change to everyday lived experiences, including heatwaves, agricultural stress and urban air quality. 

At the same time, the researchers observed gaps across all three countries. Reporting often lacked detailed engagement with vulnerable populations, medical or public health experts, and evidence-based adaptation or mitigation strategies. The authors note that positioning climate change as a health issue rather than only as an environmental or political topic can make it more personally relevant, and potentially strengthen public engagement and policy action. 

The authors noted that while India shows relatively stronger integration of health framing within climate change reporting, substantial gaps remain globally, and suggested that clearer, more consistent reporting on health risks and solutions could help bridge the gap between climate science and public understanding.