Climate Change News Coverage: How Pakistani Newspapers Covered the Conference of Parties

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges facing the world in general and Pakistan in particular. Climate-induced extreme events, including floods, heatwaves, and unpredictable rainfall, have affected the lives of ordinary Pakistanis, the country’s economy, and its agricultural sector. Pakistan is a signatory of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its government’s Ministry of Climate Change has participated regularly in the annual Conference of Parties (COP), a gathering where all the UNFCCC member states attempt figure out a political and financial solution to curb global warming. However, even though the world’s news media have focussed on climate-finance related deliberations and the effects of climate change, the Pakistani press has seemed slow to pick up on climate change news coverage, focussing mainly on the catastrophic natural disasters and environmental issues in isolation. This research studied how two Pakistani English-language and two Urdu national daily newspapers framed their news coverage of the COP events from 2013 to 2015. The study found that Pakistani newspapers only gave considerable coverage to the 2015 Paris climate conference, which was well-attended by world leaders and resulted in a consensus agreement to limit the global average temperature. The coverage framed the climate meetings through statements of politicians and officials and presented the climate negotiations as a conflict between the developing and developed countries. The number of news articles, the sources of news, and the sources quoted in the articles also revealed a low priority for climate change news, a reliance on foreign news agencies and elite sources respectively in the Pakistani newspapers.