Suffering in Silence: Are climate emergencies out of sight and out of mind?

CARE has launched its fourth annual analysis of the most under-reported humanitarian crises in the world.

We have ranked the natural disasters and conflicts that have affected a million people or more and yet received the least worldwide media attention in 2019.

The crises range from drought to displacement, conflict, epidemics and food insecurity.

In many cases, climate change is a key driver of the crisis – or is making an existing crisis worse.

Sally Austin, CARE International’s Head of Emergency Operations, says:

We’re seeing increasing linkages between the effects of man-made climate change and the longevity and complexity of humanitarian crises. The majority of crises ranked in our report are partly a consequence of declining natural resources, increasing extreme weather events and global warming more broadly.

The top 10 most under-reported crises of 2019

The amount of media coverage about crises not only affects public awareness – it also has direct impacts on the lives of crisis-affected people, not least on the level of aid funding available and the amount of assistance that affected people receive.

We also need to join the dots between global action to reduce emissions before it is too late, and the need for increased funding and support for the people most affected – especially people and communities in the countries least responsible for global heating. Sally Austin says:

The increased public attention for the global climate crisis is encouraging, but we must ensure that the conversation is not limited to the Global North and much-needed transformations there. It is shocking to see how little media reporting there is about human suffering related to global warming in the South, the lack of political action to address this injustice, and solutions applied to ease the burden for communities.

More about the Suffering in Silence report

More than 2.4 million global online sources were monitored in English, French, German, Arabic and Spanish. To filter according to scale, we chose countries in which at least one million people were affected by natural or man-made disasters, according to data by Reliefweb, ACAPS and CARE’s own data. The result was a list of 40 crises that were then screened using the media monitoring services of Meltwater Group for the time period of January 1 to November 15, 2019 with relevant keywords to describe the crises. Suffering in Silence ranks the top 10 crises which received the least amount of online media coverage.

• Download the full report from the CARE Insights website
• Read more in the Guardian’s online report Africa is humanitarian 'blind spot': Climate emergency is fuelling drought, poverty and disaster in the global south