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.