What the evidence shows

The report shows that global climate-change media coverage has grown substantially in recent years, but that how climate change is discussed has remained strikingly uniform worldwide—largely shaped by Global North media markets and international institutions like the IPCC and COP negotiations. Researchers describe this as a dynamic in which the Global South has acted more as a news “taker” than a news “maker”.

The core finding is that this pattern is now shifting. As climate impacts intensify and disproportionately hit low-emission, high-impact Global South countries, climate reporting is moving from a period focused on explaining why climate change matters—a relatively convergent, uniform global narrative—into a new “age of adaptation” focused on reporting localized impacts. This shift is expected to surface more divergent, contentious narratives, especially around who bears responsibility and cost.

The 2022 Pakistan floods are used as the central case study: drawing on personal and professional experience as Pakistani climate scholars, the authors show how Pakistani framing of the floods—particularly the concept of climate “loss and damage”—moved from being nearly absent in domestic discourse to becoming a dominant frame in both Pakistani and international coverage, coinciding with COP27’s establishment of a loss-and-damage fund.

Key Findings

• Global media attention to climate change has grown consistently over recent years, but unevenly — coverage volume remains significantly higher in the Global North than the Global South, even as the growth trend appears nearly everywhere.

• A content analysis of climate coverage across 10 countries (2006–2018, cited from Hase et al., 2021) found very little variance in the main themes and prevalence of climate coverage between Global North and South outlets, despite the two groups facing very different climate realities and responsibilities.

• Peak climate news attention follows strikingly similar temporal patterns across regions, driven by "managed" climate moments (e.g., Earth Day, IPCC report releases, COP meetings) rather than by locally distinct events.

• The 2022 Pakistan floods are presented as a turning point: Pakistani framing and the "loss and damage" concept moved rapidly from near-absence in domestic discourse to becoming a dominant global media and policy frame, coinciding with COP27's agreement to create a loss-and-damage fund that negotiators reportedly had not originally intended to establish.

Stand-out data points

• Qualitative — "taker" to "maker" shift around Pakistan's 2022 floods. The authors describe Pakistani framing (and the "loss and damage" concept specifically) as having driven global media and COP27 negotiation agendas, rather than merely reflecting a Northern-set narrative — a reversal of the historical pattern they describe.

• Qualitative — COP27 loss-and-damage fund as an unplanned outcome. The authors, describing themselves as experienced COP observers, note that loss and damage was expected to remain a "back-burner" issue at COP27 but was elevated to the point that negotiators agreed to create a global fund they had not originally intended to establish.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Actionability Loss-and-damage framing is presented as an example of a concrete, actionable policy ask that gained traction once tied to lived local impact — useful precedent for messages linking localized harm to specific policy asks.

• Emotional Resonance Supports scoring messages higher when they draw on lived, localized impact narratives (e.g., specific national or community experience) rather than abstract global framing, since these appear to carry more narrative traction once local catastrophe strikes.

• Personal Relevance The central case shows how a locally rooted narrative (Pakistan's floods, loss and damage) became more resonant and influential than externally imposed framing: supports scoring messages higher when told from within the affected community rather than about it.

• Autonomy the essay's core argument is about media agency and voice — who gets to author the narrative — which aligns closely with an ethics-of-voice question of supporting advocate-authored messaging over externally imposed framing.

• Beneficence The essay's argument supports amplifying Global South voices and locally-rooted narratives in climate communication, helping under-resourced groups shape their own narratives rather than only receiving them.

• Justice Directly addresses inequities in whose climate narratives dominate global media, given that Global South countries face the least responsibility for emissions but the greatest impacts, and have historically had the least narrative control.

— non-exhaustive.

Key quote

The authors describe the coming shift as making global climate narratives "more complex and more contentious, but also more honest."

© The Author(s) 2023. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Last update: 5 August 2026

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