Responsibility, Economy, and Human Consequences: Generic Climate-Change Frames in Global North and Global South Newspapers Across COP26–COP30

Abstract

Climate change is a worldwide issue, and news outlets do not always structure the causes, effects, and solutions of climate change in a similar manner. This paper is a comparative analysis of generic framing of climate change in six United Kingdom-based English newspapers over five consecutive United Nations climate conferences (COP26–COP30, 20212025). An example of such study was a quantitative content analysis based on a retrospective longitudinal examination of 4,755 articles on climate change coverage by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Dawn, The Nation, and The Times of India. The paper based on 5 generic frames responsibility, conflict, economic consequences, morality and human interest employed by Semetko and Valkenburg evaluated prevalence in frames overall, newspaper-level variation and North-South differences worldwide. The prevailing frame (48.4%), was responsibility, then economic consequences (22.6%), human interest (13.2%), conflict (10.8%), and morality (5.0%). Frame distributions differed significantly across newspapers, χ²(20, N = 4,755) = 280.86, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .122, and across regions, χ²(4, N = 4,755) = 119.25, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .158. Responsibility framing was more prominently used in newspapers of Global North, and the economic consequences, human interest, and morality were of a somewhat higher importance in Global South newspapers. The framing of conflicts varied almost equally with regions. The results indicate transnational convergence and regionally patterned interpretive priorities in climate journalism and show the utility in using cross-newspaper and cross-region comparisons together in deductive frame analysis.