How Are Floods Around the World Reported?

by A.Ishida | 17 October 2024 | Environment, News View, World

In 2024, heavy rains and floods caused devastating damage across countries and regions around the world. Yet it cannot be said that every water-related disaster was reported.

In Japan’s major newspapers (Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri), the flood disasters that were covered at least once between the time of occurrence and October 12, 2024, were as follows. Florida in the United States was hit by two large-scale hurricanes from late September into October, leaving a total of 250 dead. The economic damage to affected regions is also immense, with the series of hurricanes expected to cause losses approaching USD 500 billion. In Nepal, the capital Kathmandu and nearby areas saw rain continue for more than 72 hours from September 27. With large parts of Kathmandu submerged, as of September 30, more than 200 deaths had been confirmed. In Japan’s Noto region of Ishikawa Prefecture, record-breaking rainfall in late September led to 14 deaths. The Noto region had already suffered major damage from an earthquake with a maximum intensity of 7 on January 1, 2024, and there are concerns about delays in reconstruction.

Meanwhile, despite suffering significant flood damage in 2024, places such as Nigeria, Yemen, Bangladesh, Central Europe, and Morocco received no coverage at all in Japanese newspapers. While touching on the details of these floods, we will also look at how floods around the world are reported in Japanese media, comparing them with coverage of other natural disasters.

Buildings in Libya destroyed by a storm in September 2023 (Photo: МЧС России / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 4.0])

Disaster situation in 2023

Before moving into the media analysis, let’s look at the current state of various disasters occurring around the world, reviewing those that happened over the course of 2023.

The data used in the chart below is cited from the disaster database EM-DAT. EM-DAT is a database that records natural disasters that have occurred since 1900 across 184 countries. Natural disasters are categorized into drought, earthquake, extreme temperature, flood, landslide, avalanche, volcano, and fire.

According to EM-DAT, there were 399 disasters in 2023, 93.1 million people were affected, and 86,473 people died as a result of disasters.

As the chart below shows, the number of events was highest for floods, storms, earthquakes, and avalanches, with floods and storms standing out in particular. The number of people affected was greatest for floods, droughts, earthquakes, and storms, broadly mirroring the trend in the number of events. By contrast, deaths were highest for earthquakes, storms, and floods. Because more than 50,000 people died in the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, earthquakes caused an exceptionally high number of deaths relative to the number of events.

Let’s pick out several of the larger-scale disasters that occurred in 2023.

The disaster that caused the most deaths in 2023 was the earthquake that struck Turkey on February 6. In Turkey and neighboring Syria, a total of 56,000 people were killed and 18 million were affected. In September, heavy rains in Libya led to dam failures and catastrophic flooding. In Libya, there were 12,352 deaths, including 8,000 people missing, from the series of disasters. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, torrential rains occurred in May, causing levee failures and landslides in various areas, resulting in around 450 deaths and 2,500 missing. In Morocco, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake, and in Afghanistan, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake, killed 2,946 and 2,445 people respectively. In addition, monsoon-season heavy rains and flooding in India claimed 1,529 lives, and Cyclone Freddy, which struck East Africa, killed 1,209 people in Malawi.

Media analysis of 2023 disasters

As we have seen, many disasters occurred around the world in 2023, causing major damage. So how were they reported? From here, we look at the realities of disaster coverage.

For this article, we examined the Yomiuri Shimbun’s international reporting in 2023 (※1). Following EM-DAT’s classification, the chart below shows the number of reports by disaster type. Note that avalanches are counted as zero because there were no reports focusing on events outside Japan.

According to the data, coverage of disasters in Yomiuri’s international reporting in 2023 was dominated by earthquakes and fires, with the remainder accounting for only a few percent of the total. Despite the large numbers of people affected and killed or injured, water-related disasters such as floods and storms, as well as droughts, received very little coverage.

As discussed in a past GNV article, one reason is that earthquakes are “familiar” in Japan. Roughly 20% of earthquakes with a magnitude of 6.0 or greater occur in Japan, which is often called an “earthquake-prone country.” Because earthquakes command strong domestic interest, they tend to receive more coverage in international reporting. Another factor is that the earthquake in Turkey, which accounted for 70% of 2023 earthquake coverage, caused an overwhelming number of deaths.

Heavy coverage of fires can be attributed to the fact that about 85% of fire-related reports concerned the US state of Hawaii. Wildfires that broke out on Maui on August 8, 2023, left 128 dead and caused about USD 5.5 billion in economic losses. Among fires in 2023, this event had the largest scale of damage (deaths and economic loss), and thus likely attracted significant coverage. That said, it should not be overlooked that events in the United States tend to receive high attention in Japanese reporting. Hawaii is a popular destination for visitors from Japan, and disasters in such locations likely attract greater attention. By contrast, a large wildfire in Algeria in late July 2023 killed 34 people but was not reported at all.

Reporting analysis limited to floods and heavy rain (10 years)

From here, we extend the study period to identify reporting trends around water-related disasters such as floods and heavy rains in greater detail.

The following data examines coverage of water-related disasters such as floods and heavy rains in Yomiuri Shimbun’s international reporting over the 10 years from October 1, 2014, to September 30, 2024 (※2). The aggregated data is presented in charts by region (※3) and by country (※4).

By region, the volume of coverage is highest in Asia, followed by North America, Central and South America, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. By country, the United States, China, Thailand, the Philippines, Libya, North Korea, and Vanuatu had the most coverage, in that order.

Reasons for this distribution by country include the overall scarcity of flood-related reporting and the concentration of coverage on specific disasters. Many reports on water-related disasters consist of only one or two articles per event, with little follow-up on the damage. The relatively large number of reports on the United States and China can be attributed to annual coverage of damage caused by hurricanes, torrential rains, and typhoons, with comparatively detailed reporting on the impacts. The Philippines is covered in a similar way; while typhoon damage in 2014 received particularly intensive coverage, there has also been reporting on typhoon damage every two to three years.

By contrast, the higher volume of coverage for Thailand, Libya, and Vanuatu resulted from a dozen or so articles on a specific disaster in each case.

In Thailand, reporting on the 2018 cave incident accounted for 18 of 20 articles. In brief, a youth soccer team entered a cave that floods during the rainy season and became trapped; they were rescued over the course of two weeks. As GNV has noted in the past, coverage began a week after the incident, once the victims’ survival was confirmed, suggesting attention focused on the subsequent “rescue drama.”

In Libya, all 14 of 14 articles concerned the floods of 2023. On September 10 and 11, heavy rains fell in eastern Libya, and the failure of two dams resulted in 12,352 deaths, including about 8,000 missing. As noted earlier, this was the second deadliest disaster of 2023, and the scale of the damage likely drove the coverage. Another factor may have been the sensational nature of so many people dying in an instant as the dams failed, unlike other floods where the numbers of dead and missing emerge gradually.

Vanuatu received intensive coverage for a cyclone in 2015. All 12 of 12 articles were about this cyclone. It affected every province in Vanuatu, with more than 160,000 people affected and 16 deaths. Although the cyclone itself was intense and damage to infrastructure was severe, the relatively low death toll later attracted attention; however, this is not why Yomiuri focused on it. In March 2015, when the cyclone struck, the then-president of Vanuatu and officials from the Vanuatu Red Cross were attending the UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction held in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Other than that, there was no coverage at all of floods in Vanuatu, and it was as if no one reported that two cyclones made landfall in March 2023, affecting more than 250,000 people.

Even if floods in countries that usually go unreported are occasionally highlighted, overall far more floods go unreported. For example, the floods in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in May 2023 that caused around 450 deaths and 2,500 missing due to heavy rain and levee failures, and the water-related disasters in India during multiple bouts of monsoon-season heavy rains from June to September 2023 that killed more than 1,500 people, were not covered at all by Yomiuri. Among the other papers, Mainichi ran “Congo: Flooding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 400 dead” on May 10, 2023, and Asahi ran “Democratic Republic of Congo flood, 203 dead” on May 8, 2023, both touching on the floods in the DRC. However, both articles were only about 100–300 characters long, far too short to convey the full scope of the disaster. And none of the newspapers discussed the water-related disasters in India in 2023. One possible reason is that there was no single “impactful” major flood; rather, many people died from the accumulation of smaller flood events, which went unreported.

Flooding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in May 2023 (Photo: MONUSCO Photos / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 2.0])

Flood and heavy rain damage in 2024

As noted at the outset, by mid-October 2024, water-related disasters had already occurred in many parts of the world. For the two hurricanes that struck the southern United States in September and October, there were a total of 16 and 10 articles, respectively, across the three major newspapers between the disaster’s occurrence and October 12, 2024. However, there were other floods that, despite their scale, went unreported. Here we highlight several of them. The amount of coverage for each disaster was checked in the databases of Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, and Mainichi Shimbun for the period from occurrence to October 12, 2024.

Nigeria