April 2026
CRAW is a research endeavor by the Climate Vulnerability Project at the University of Oxford. As the climate crisis intensifies and becomes more politically salient, it is vital to know how media reporting on climate change influences citizens' knowledge. Current efforts are excellent (MeCCO), but focus on select national reporting. The goal of CRAW is to map climate change reporting at the local level, across the world. It is not a map of places reported about in connection to climate change; the CRAW database seeks to map the frequency of climate reporting that likely readers/website visitors would be exposed to.
To map climate reporting, CRAW gelocates the probable headquarters of media outlets included in the GDELT Knowledge Graph Database using an open-source approach. Assessing the automated theme tags from GDELT, we are able to estimate the intensity of climate coverage at a granular level. The zoomable and panable map below lets you see where climate change is most (yellow) and least reported (dark blue) cumulatively since 2015. Click to drag, and double-click to zoom in on the map and see your community's climate exposure to media about about climate change. Pinch to zoom also works.
A working paper that explains the data collection, validation, and analysis is available: SocArXiv. Be aware we are updating this working paper, as it relies on a prelminary version of the dataset. More information coming soon.
Gray cells indicate the absence of media outlets, or where we were unable to identify if a media outlet is headquartered in a specific cell.