Event or Context? Episodic and Thematic Climate-Change Framing Across Global North and Global South Newspapers During COP26–COP30

Abstract

Climate journalism might also manifest climate change as a series of individual happenings or as a structural issue inherent in scientific, political, economic and historical relations. Based on the Iyengar IEP/ITC difference between episodic and thematic framing, I conducted a comparative study of narrative orientation of 4,755 English-language newspaper articles discussing the climate change topic at the standardized COP26COP30 coverage periods (20212025). The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Sydney Morning Herald were sampled as the Global North; Dawn, The Nation, and The Times of India were part of the Global South sample. The paper also visualizes the quantity of coverage in each of the newspapers, regions and sequence of COP. COP26 generated the highest volume (1,271 articles, 26.7%), followed by COP27 (957), COP28 (950), COP29 (840), and COP30 (737). The statistical significance but small values of regional volume differences across COPs were, 35.40, 4,755, 001, Cramer V =.086. The most significant distinction was in the form of narrative: 63.06% of the coverage in the Global North was in the form of narratives, and 76.92% of the coverage in the Global South was episodic. The association between region and narrative orientation was strong, χ²(1, N = 4,755) = 763.26, p < .001, φ = .401. The results are all that regional variations on climate journalism are articulated more through contextualization than total attention. The article urges climate journalists to employ a journalism style that equally focuses on the immediacy of events but grounds itself more in structural explanation and is necessary in high-risk environments that would otherwise see disaster-related news dominate the external discourse.