Biodiversity Loss in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Biodiversity Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how biodiversity and its loss were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 80,378 de-duplicated articles, and set that coverage beside 35,332 research papers (2015–2025) and 5,209 patent families (2015–2024) on the topic. Six results stand out: A small, slowly rising share. Biodiversity took 5.81 of every 10,000 news articles in 2025, 1.17 times its 2019 share of 4.98. The low point was 2020, at 3.98 per 10,000. Peaks fall in conference months. The largest monthly share was December 2022 (11.52 per 10,000), the month the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted. The second was October 2024 (10.22), the month COP16 opened in Cali. Geography. The United States holds 19.36% of located articles but is under-represented (lift 0.4). Ecuador (10.36), Colombia (9.4) and Indonesia (4.4) are the most over-represented of the leading countries, and South America (3.99) the most over-represented continent. Within India, Assam (9.42), Goa (5.95) and Odisha (2.72) lead. Shifting attention. Colombia's share of its own news rose from 5.39 per 10,000 in 2023 to 76.95 in 2024. Canada's fell from 9.19 in 2023 to 3.6 in 2025 (0.39 times), after a peak of 28.31 in 2022. Tone. Coverage is more positive than news in general: 74.1% of articles are positive in tone (all news: 56.8%) and 23.1% negative (all news: 33.6%). 67.9% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Research and invention. Biodiversity papers grew from 4.19 to 6.94 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025 (1.66 times). Patent families grew from 62 in 2015 to 1,280 in 2024, and 97.7% were filed in China.