Today’s map is from the global humanitarian relief organization CARE International, which analyzed media coverage of global crises to determine the most under-covered man-made or natural disasters in 2017.

 

CARE says it monitored more than 1.2 million global online sources in English, French and German, analyzing reporting about in which at least one million people were affected by man-made or natural disaster. This resulted in nearly 40 crises in 2017. Of these 40 crises, the following ten yielded the fewest number of media articles in 2017.

They are, in this sense, the most overlooked and under reported global crises.

 

This video from CARE explains their findings.

 

The most interesting finding is that North Korea tops the list of most under-reported global humanitarian crises.

On the one hand, this is surprising. North Korea regularly makes headlines throughout the world. But coverage of North Korea almost exclusively focuses on nuclear saber rattling, and not on the massive humanitarian crisis that the people of North Korea endure.

Your average news consumer, for example, probably knows that Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon and launched several ballistic missiles in 2017. But your average news consumer is probably not aware that North Korea suffered its worst drought since 2001 last year, compounding an already dire food security crisis. The UN estimates that some 18 million people–about 70% of the population — are food insecure.

So while “North Korea” was hardly ignored by the global news media in 2017, the plight of ordinary people suffering in extreme hardship was, in fact, the most overlooked global crisis of the last year.

Read the full report.