Douglas Ponton¹

8 de abril de 2026

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Este escrito compõe a Série Especial do Boletim Lua Nova, em conjunto com pesquisadores e pesquisadoras vinculados à rede internacional Justice in the XXI Century: A Perspective from Latin America (JUSTLA). O projeto, coordenado pela Universidade de Catania (Itália) e financiado pela União Europeia no âmbito da ação HORIZON–Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges, reúne 148 integrantes de 18 instituições da América Latina e da União Europeia.

Os escritos são um convite a atravessar diferentes territórios do conhecimento para (re)pensar a justiça no século XXI. Ao longo da série, o JUSTLA promove um diálogo entre pesquisas desenvolvidas em diferentes contextos e abordagens, de modo que o leitor e a leitora poderão acompanhar um movimento no qual ideias, contextos e práticas se entrelaçam para reinventar, no presente, o sentido da justiça. Os textos do Especial podem ser conferidos aqui.

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Climate change is not only a scientific or political problem; it is also a linguistic one. The way the crisis is framed in public discourse has a powerful effect on how responsibility is assigned and which solutions appear thinkable. Expressions such as “climate crisis” or “climate Armageddon” are not neutral, and nor are labels inspired by opposing ideologies, such as “climate hoax” or “global warming scam”. Words matter because they help organise how people understand what is happening, who is to blame, and what, if anything, should be done.

This text looks at how climate change is talked about in news media across different geopolitical contexts, with particular attention to contrasts between the so-called Global North and Global South. Rather than asking whether climate change is real or serious, a question on which there is overwhelming scientific consensus, the focus is on how language shapes the stories told about it. Different stories construct different worlds: some focus on individual behaviour, others on collective anxiety, while others present climate change as a question of global injustice.

These differences matter because language does not simply describe reality; it helps produce it. For decades, mass media have played a central role in shaping public opinion, deciding which issues demand attention and which actors remain visible or invisible. Media narratives can make responsibility appear diffuse and personal, or structural and political. From a linguistic perspective, this means that even well-intentioned climate communication may reproduce unequal power relations, deflect attention from systemic causes, and narrow the political scope of climate justice.

Differences in the reporting of climate change are striking. In much Western media coverage, climate change is framed as an urgent and all-encompassing threat that demands immediate action from everyone. Disasters are catalogued in emotive language: rising sea levels, extreme heat, floods, fires. Climate stories are frequently accompanied by dramatic images, contributing to an increasingly apocalyptic mood. At the same time, individuals are directly targeted, through headlines such as “what can you do to help save the planet?”. Readers are repeatedly invited to reflect on their own behaviour and to act accordingly: reduce consumption, change habits, make better choices. For example, the website of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a US-based environmental advocacy organisation, carries an article entitled How You Can Stop Global Warming, which begins: 

“Rising sea levels. Raging storms. Searing heat. Ferocious fires. Severe drought. Punishing floods. The effects of climate change are already threatening our health, our communities, our economy, our security, and our children’s future.”

The underlying message is clear. The crisis is real and terrifying, and responsibility is shared by the common citizen. The overall tenor of this reporting encourages readers to take climate change seriously, but also to accept a personal moral burden for addressing it. While such narratives can raise awareness, they also carry significant risks. When the crisis is presented as both catastrophic and individually solvable, structural causes of climate breakdown are pushed into the background. Anxiety, guilt, and fatigue become predictable responses.

In this respect, climate communication in mainstream Western media resembles other fear-driven discourses that have circulated in recent decades, including those around Islamic terrorism and especially the Covid pandemic. In the latter case, the omnipresent threat was strongly linked to individuals, with limited space for the attribution of causality and responsibility at institutional levels. In climate discourse, proposed measures likewise focus on the individual, promoting lifestyle changes that may reduce carbon footprints. At a macro level, however, little is done to address fossil fuel extraction, industrial over-production, and the broader dynamics of late capitalism that lie at the root of the crisis.

By contrast, climate reporting from many non-Western contexts, including those of the Global South, operates in a different register. Climate change is less often framed as an abstract future apocalypse. Instead, conditions of present vulnerability are stressed. Articles focus on floods that displace populations, heatwaves that undermine health and food security, and storms that damage infrastructure and livelihoods. Responsibility is not constructed in terms of individual lifestyle choices, but rather through references to historical inequality, uneven development, and global economic asymmetries. Covering COP 27, for example, we find The News (Pakistan) writing:

“Countries in the North continue to ignore the havoc their decadent plunder of the planet’s resources has brought about elsewhere in the world.”

In such accounts, climate change is not simply an environmental issue but a question of justice. Industrialised countries are implicitly or explicitly identified as responsible for a crisis whose most severe consequences are felt elsewhere. Demands for action frequently involve assigning blame and calling for compensation, short-term funding, or relief measures. The crisis is not framed as something individuals are exhorted to solve through changes in everyday behaviour, but as a problem that requires structural redress.

These narratives are quite distinct in character, and rarely converge. Western audiences are pressured to worry; to feel morally implicated in every purchase, to contemplate their ‘carbon footprint’, to own fewer cars. Audiences in more vulnerable regions are invited to see themselves as victims of neo-colonialism; exposed, entitled to assistance,  unfairly burdened by decisions made elsewhere. Both narratives contain elements of truth. Taken together, however, they tend to blur the outlines of climate justice. What is striking in both cases is not only what is said, but what remains largely absent from the conversation. In neither narrative are the most powerful actors in the global economy consistently named or scrutinised. Fossil fuel corporations, transnational financial institutions, and the structural demands of a growth-driven economic system often appear only at the margins, if at all. Instead, responsibility is displaced–downward, onto individual citizens in the Global North, or outward, onto an abstract post-colonial discourse of historical guilt, reparation, moral obligation.

This displacement has political consequences. In Western contexts, citizens may be encouraged to believe that enough personal effort, multiplied across millions of lives, can avert catastrophe, even as COP emissions targets remain unmet, and corporate practices remain unchanged. In non-Western contexts, the emphasis on aid and compensation risks reproducing older patterns of dependency, where responsibility is acknowledged in principle but does not lead to transformative change.

The result is a global conversation that generates urgency without clarity. Climate change is everywhere in public discourse, yet accountability remains diffuse. Emotional language amplifies fear and moral pressure, but obfuscates the mechanisms through which environmental destruction is produced and sustained. If climate justice is to become more than a slogan, this narrative landscape needs rethinking. Less emphasis on the individual’s responsibility, and less reliance on the dynamics of first-world power, may open space for a more realistic debate. It may be politically uncomfortable to name the actors who profit most from environmental degradation, but it is necessary. Without this shift, climate communication risks exhausting the public while leaving the foundations of the crisis intact.

Research orientation and materials

The reflections offered here are grounded in discourse-analytic research conducted within the framework of the JUSTLA project, which examines climate justice from a global, interdisciplinary perspective. From a linguistic point of view, the analysis draws on ecolinguistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA), approaches concerned with how language shapes social reality, distributes responsibility, and legitimises particular courses of action. Ecolinguistics is especially relevant here, since it focuses on the environmental consequences of dominant ways of talking about the world, and on the stories that encourage either harmful or more sustainable relations with nature.

Rather than treating media texts as neutral reflections of events, a discourse-analytic perspective views them as sites where meaning is actively shaped by values and assumptions. Key questions are concerned with narration and agency: Who is presented as acting? Who is affected? Who remains linguistically invisible? This last point is particularly important: if Western climate discourse consistently foregrounds what “we” can or should do to address the crisis, then the powerful social actors most responsible for it fade from view.

The analysis is based on a comparative reading of climate-related news coverage from Western media alongside reporting from international and non-Western contexts, including material circulated by global news agencies and regionally based platforms. The aim is to identify recurring ways in which the climate crisis is framed across different discursive environments. The examples discussed are therefore illustrative rather than exhaustive, and are used to show how similar events can be narrated through very different lenses, with significant implications for how climate justice is understood.

By combining close attention to media language with a concern for political and ecological consequences, this approach highlights how certain stories about climate change become naturalised, while others struggle to gain visibility. In doing so, it seeks to show how linguistic analysis can contribute to wider debates about responsibility, inequality, and the conditions under which meaningful climate action becomes thinkable.

A Western climate story

Firstly, the Western context. The following piece appeared in the Independent online and typifies what I have described as an “individual responsibility” frame:

Three out of four Independent readers consider themselves environmentally friendly and have acted to make their homes more energy efficient, to shop locally, and to adapt how they travel and eat. As communities and leaders worldwide recognise that transformative action must happen now, we invite you to share stories of the unsung climate heroes in your community.

What is striking here is the way this framing positions readers as implicitly responsible for the solution, and the role played by evaluation in the process. To be “environmentally friendly” is positively judged; readers are invited to recognise themselves in the values of the newspaper, and in a set of specific social practices: making one’s home “energy efficient”, shopping locally, and changing patterns of travel and eating. Those who respond are cast as “heroes”, answering a call for “transformative action” issued by “communities and leaders worldwide”. Seen in these terms, the article advances a clear, if implicit, call for action. Readers are invited to participate by celebrating exemplary behaviour, but also to internalise it. To be part of this moral community is to adopt these practices oneself. Transformative change is thus imagined as the widespread uptake of everyday behavioural adjustments, with climate catastrophe presented as the outcome if such changes fail to occur at scale.

It is striking how easily this language of heroism and personal responsibility slips into Western media discourse, downplaying questions of international regulation or corporate accountability.

From the Global South

The following text appeared in 2022 in The News, an online platform based in Pakistan:

The past few years have indeed seen some of the most severe signs of a climate raging, a new UN report revealing that the past eight years were the eight hottest ever recorded while the floods in Pakistan this year highlighting the dangers the Global South faces as countries in the North continue to ignore the havoc their decadent plunder of the planet’s resources has brought about elsewhere in the world.

Here, we notice the intense pattern of evaluation which, as mentioned above, highlights the emotive dimension and has a powerful motivational pull on the reader: ‘severe signs’, ‘climate raging’, ‘hottest ever recorded’, ‘dangers’, ‘to ignore the havoc’, ‘decadent plunder’. It draws on institutional backing to strengthen its rhetorical appeal (‘a new UN report’), while it explicitly frames the climate crisis as due to ‘plunder’ carried out by the ‘countries in the North’. By contrast with the Western example, the reader as an individual is not called upon to do anything in the way of lifestyle changes. Rather, they are invited to feel something – a sense of outrage at past exploitation and present indifference, and to share the newspaper’s understanding of the causes of the current crisis. 

In conclusion

The text so far has only summarised a much wider body of research that identified diverse frames in the data and numerous other points of interest not reported here for reasons of space. Hopefully, the examples given, though of course not representative of the texts as a whole, convey something of the very different tone in the stories narrated concerning the climate crisis. From both a critical discourse and an ecolinguistic perspective, neither story is entirely satisfactory. The climate crisis may have historical roots in practices of colonial plunder, but to assert this, to appeal to past resentments, is to gloss over the role of developing countries like China or Brazil in the current scenario. Again, to mobilise individuals in Western countries may help to spread awareness of the gravity of climate change, but to frame it as the most important response of all is to misrepresent both the causes of the crisis and its possible resolution.

The consequence of the patterns identified above is a global conversation that generates urgency without clarity. Climate change is everywhere in public discourse, yet true accountability is elusive. Moral language amplifies concern and pressure, but rarely illuminates the mechanisms through which harm is produced and sustained. For many audiences, this results in a feeling of fatigue or even guilt rather than generating activism, giving them a sense of total responsibility for a problem to which they are mostly minor contributors. Meanwhile, to appeal to post-colonial resentment may attract readers but takes few steps in the direction of a practical solution.

If climate justice is to become more than a slogan, this narrative landscape needs rethinking. Above all, more attention needs to be directed towards the globalised mechanisms of capitalism; to our continued reliance on fossil fuels, to deforestation, to the thousand harmful effects of daily consumer practices worldwide, whether these involve the meat industry, cruise tourism, or power generation. More media attention should focus on the role of big capital, of multinational corporations, of global mechanisms of governance in the crisis. The most useful contribution media can make at the current crisis point is to name the actors who profit most from environmental degradation and the economic structures that normalise it. Without this shift, climate communication will continue to mislead and destabilise public attention, leaving the foundations of the crisis intact.

* Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or HORIZON-MSCA-2023-Staff Exchanges JUSTLA – Justice in the XXI Century: A Perspective from Latin America, Grant Agreement: 101183054. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

** Este texto não reflete necessariamente as opiniões do Boletim Lua Nova ou do CEDEC. Gosta do nosso trabalho? Apoie o Boletim Lua Nova!²

1. Douglas Mark Ponton is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania. He has held teaching and research positions at the universities of Catania, Messina and Pisa. His current research interests include Ecolinguistics, Positive Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies and Pragmatics. Some recent publications: Exploring Ecolinguistics: Ecological Principles and Narrative Practices (Bloomsbury, 2024), Understanding Political Persuasion: Linguistic and Rhetorical Analysis (Vernon Press, 2019). ↩︎
2. Referência Imagética: Increased forest fires due to climate change (Credits: Friedrich Haag, Klimawandel 001 2014 03 18, CC BY-SA 4.0) ↩︎