The Global South and Climate Coverage: From News Taker to News Maker

Abstract

Global media coverage of climate change has grown consistently—although unevenly—over recent years. While major differences exist in how much attention is paid to climate coverage in different parts of the world, how climate is discussed has been noticeably uniform and the major thrust of the “climate communication agenda” remains recognizably “global” in that it is driven by the more mature media markets in the North and especially by the narratives coming out of international climate institutions (e.g., the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], climate Conference of the parties [COPs] international nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], and think tanks). Building on the recent experience of the 2022 floods in Pakistan, this essay argues that with the advent of what we are calling the age of adaptation, climate reporting is likely to shift rapidly from mostly explaining why climate change is important (and generally convergent broad ideas about what might be done about it) to reporting on localized climate impacts (and often divergent preferences on how to allocate responsibility and evaluate the cost of those consequences). This will, we argue, make global media narratives on climate change not only more complex and more contentious, but also more honest.

Let us start with the good news, which is that global media has finally started paying attention to the existential threat posed by climate change (Boykoff et al., 2023; United Nations, 2018) and people feel reasonably well served by how news media covers climate change (Ejaz et al., 2022). The bad news is that the actual global climate is not showing any signs of improvement; at least, not yet. If anything, things may be getting worse (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2022). However, the important news is that the onset of what one of us has previously described as the age of adaptation (Najam, 2017, 2022a) is bound to make climate change coverage more nuanced, driven by the increasing occurrence of extreme climate events. Given that these events disproportionately impact the Global South, we should expect that narratives from low-emission, high-climate-impact countries will take on a more significant role in shaping global conversations on climate change.

As Pakistani scholars focused on climate, development, and communication, we have been studying the devastating impacts of climate change around the world, including our own country, Pakistan. As a country with an extremely low carbon footprint, Pakistan is not a major contributor to global climate change but has seen a persistent cascade of extreme floods, erratic monsoons, glacial outbursts, deadly heatwaves, and persistent drought—often at the same time (Najam, 2022b; Rannard, 2022; United Nations, 2022). As scholars, we have seen our own intellectual attention shift all too rapidly from warning about the possible future impacts of global climate change to having to document those impacts as they unfold in real time. And we are convinced that what we are seeing is not just a Pakistani phenomenon but a bellwether of a shift in how global climate narratives are becoming more divergent and, often, more contentious.

Media and Climate Change

Based on the understanding that media attention can both reflect and shape societal attitudes toward environmental issues, as well as influence policy decisions (Arlt et al., 2011; Carmichael & Brulle, 2016; Carvalho, 2010; Moser, 2010; Najam, 1995), researchers have recently devoted significant attention to examining the extent and nature of media coverage on climate change (Boykoff et al., 2023; Schäfer & Schlichting, 2014). Researchers are now exploring what is being reported within climate change–related stories (Barkemeyer et al., 2017; Vu et al., 2019), how this varies over time and within annual cycles (Boykoff et al., 2023; Saunders et al., 2018), and how and when climate change stories are “domesticated” in terms of issues covered or expertise cited (Ejaz et al., 2023; Kunelius & Yagodin, 2017; Olausson, 2014). Central to our current enquiry, however, is the extent to which climate coverage varies across countries, and the relatively unsettled question of how climate narratives have historically flowed from the mostly high-emission societies of the Global North despite the fact that the climate context of most low-emission countries of the Global South are so fundamentally different (Tietjen, 2022). A robust and important finding in this recent scholarship on climate news is that there is a clear increase in the global media’s appetite for climate change coverage, and this growing trend can be seen nearly everywhere in the world, even though the relative number of climate change–related stories remains significantly more in the Global North than in the South. Media coverage of climate change has been steadily increasing in all parts of the world, but much more in some parts than others (Boykoff et al., 2023).

Even a cursory analysis of the more nuanced questions, however, offers important insights. For example, while there are clear differences between regions, there is striking similarity in the temporal patterns of peak climate news interest that is episodic and is predominantly driven by managed climate moments—for example, Earth Day celebrations, release of key climate reports such as those of the IPCC, climate Conference of the parties (COPs), and so on (Painter & Schäfer, 2018; Wolling & Arlt, 2017). This trend is strikingly clear at regional levels but can also be observed from country-level studies (Hase et al., 2021; Lück et al., 2016; Painter, 2017). Importantly, there is surprising conformity in how policy episodes such as IPCC reports or COP meetings are covered in developing and industrialized countries (Lück et al., 2016; Painter, 2017; Wang & Downey, 2023).

Notwithstanding the tendency of many climate scholars, particularly from the Global North, to focus more of the “common” rather than the “differentiated” aspects of climate’s globality, the lived reality of climate change—both in causing it and facing its impacts—are clearly very different in different parts of the world (Najam, 2002, 2005). Given the visible differences between countries in how they have contributed to the climate problem, their very differentiated capabilities for responding to it, and the remarkably different ways in which they experience the impacts of climate change, it is surprising that there is very little difference in climate coverage.

A recent content analysis of newspaper coverage of climate change from 2006–2018 in 10 countries of the Global South and North (Hase et al., 2021) found very little variance in the content of coverage in terms of main themes and their prevalence. Limited news budgets and threats to journalists’ safety, among other challenges, greatly constrain southern media markets, so it is unsurprising that they act as passive consumers of climate stories passed down to them through global news chains. Moreover, when the primary goal of climate communication is awareness, it can be convenient to simply reflect, and sometimes recycle, ideas and narratives received from more mature global media markets. This powerful flow of climate narratives from North to South can change dramatically, however, when societies are hit by major climate impacts.

Global South: From News “Taker” to News “Maker”

We are now beginning to see growth in localized media coverage in relation to major climate impact events, in both North and South: for example, floods in Pakistan, drought across Africa, fire in Australia, heatwaves across Europe, extreme cold in North America, and so on. Historically, the total volume of media coverage generated by such events has been drowned out in global aggregate trends in comparison with broader “awareness” stories (Hase et al., 2021). As the occurrence and severity of felt extreme climate impacts increases (IPCC, 2022), we should, however, expect to see the volume of climate “news” increasing and possibly overtaking more generic and generalized stories about the climate phenomenon. As this happens, the patterns of climate change coverage could become more divergent and, possibly, driven less by policy episodes and more by extreme climate events themselves (see Russill in this special issue).

While climate impacts will, of course, not be restricted to the Global South, we posit that the impact of such a shift on developing countries is likely to be not merely in how much they talk about climate change but also in how they talk about it. For example, as researchers from Pakistan, we closely monitored how the national and global media covered the 2022 floods and how rapidly and deeply it was linked to a broader climate change narrative, both nationally and internationally (Rannard, 2022; United Nations, 2022). Although research by Ejaz and colleagues (2021) shows that in the past, developing countries like Pakistan have mostly been “takers” of a global climate narrative till now and have mostly mirrored Northern discourse and framing, Najam (2022a) expects that in the age of adaptation, low-emission high-impact Global South countries will increasingly become makers of climate narratives and reporting. We believe that the expected rapid increase in local climate impacts (IPCC, 2022) is likely to (a) add more complexity to current global media trends on climate coverage and (b) substantively introduce more divergent, possibly contentious, directions within the global media’s climate discourse. The recent (2022) floods in Pakistan illustrate this emerging trend.

During the 2022 floods in Pakistan, we saw not only a local surge of climate-related media reporting around the floods but also the rapid development of domestic narratives that focused on human impacts related, for example, to dislocation, displacement, and disease. Given the enormity of this particular climate calamity, the flow of how the story was framed globally also seemed to shift. Not just Pakistani journalists and experts but a Pakistani framing of the event quickly became visible across global media, both electronic and print. Clearly, the Pakistan narrative was a “maker” and not a “taker” of the framing in this instance (The Economist, 2022; Lakhani, 2022; Najam, 2022a; Nature, 2022).

The idea that the onslaught of extreme climate events can push southern media’s climate coverage to become more divergent and possibly more contentious was also very evident in the case of the 2022 floods in Pakistan. In countries that have contributed relatively little to causing climate change, the physical shock of extreme climate impacts can be compounded by a deep sense of injustice, as it clearly was in Pakistan (Lakhani, 2022). In this case, the result was an immediate focus on the idea of climate “loss and damage”—an idea that was nearly absent from the policy or media discourse in Pakistan before the floods but quickly became a popular staple of both (Sheikh, 2022). Here, too, the discourse from Pakistan turned into a “maker” for the global narrative as it soon became necessary for global media outlets also to frame the Pakistan floods in the context of “loss and damage” (Nature, 2022). This trend was strengthened by the fact that the floods had hit right before COP27 in Egypt where loss and damage was already an agenda item. As experienced observers of climate COPs (Najam, 2015), however, it is clear to us that what would otherwise have been a back-burner issue at COP27 was propelled to a front-row issue; so much so, that the negotiators surprised themselves by having to agree to a global loss-and-damage fund that they had not originally intended to create (Lakhani, 2022; Najam, 2022b). Equally important, though less noticed, was the contentiousness of the argument, especially as the policy and media discourse in Pakistan increasingly injected ideas of global “climate reparations” into their narratives, while international coverage ignored or downplayed this land-mine (The Economist, 2022; Najam, 2022b; Nature, 2022b).

Coverage of Pakistan’s 2022 floods offers one striking example of how climate reporting in the Global South might change. Coverage of this recent catastrophic climate event demonstrates that narratives emanating from the South may become “makers” of broader global narratives. We may be seeing the increased power of Global South narratives in coverage of the recent drought in Africa (Mohammed, 2022; Werners & Okunola, 2023), rising sea levels in Southeast Asia (Boztas, 2022), extreme heat in the Middle East (McDonagh, 2021), and melting Himalayan glaciers (Schauenberg, 2022). With more severe climate events across the Global South, we can expect the region’s media to take more control of its climate narratives. This, we believe, is a good thing, even if it does make the global climate change media discourse more complex and contentious.