Coverage of Climate Change Negotiations in the South African Press

The second presenter in this climate change-themed session at IAMCR 2023 is Henri-Count Evans, whose interest is in South African press coverage of climate change negotiations. Climate change is a global threat, of course, but disproportionately affects poor and marginalised countries; there have been global efforts, facilitated by the UN, to address the crisis since at least 1995 and the start of the COP summits. These are often marked by conflicting interests and political agendas, resulting in substantial tension between the Global South and Global North.

Media representations of these debates often reproduce specific narratives, which in turn also further affect future negotiations. The present study examines how the South African news media have portrayed (and affected) South African negotiating positions, and are thus sometimes becoming extensions of the political system.

Such climate negotiations emerged in the late 1980s, and started in earnest with the COP1 summit in 1995 and its adoption of the Berlin Mandate; the 1997 Kyoto Protocol furthered these early steps, but with its division of countries into two categories also shielded developing countries (in what’s called the ‘BASIC’ category) from addressing their carbon emissions in earnest.

The present study examined climate change coverage in four South African newspapers from 2011 (when South Africa hoisted COP17) to 2018, using a set of keywords to identify some 770 relevant articles (reduced further to 73 articles focussing specifically on climate negotiations). It analysed these for portrayals of climate responsibilities.

Key discourses contained blame-shifting and the concealing of developing nations’ responsibility; the Global North is positioned as the key culprit which should bear the burden of emissions reduction. Global South countries are instead positioned as passive victims of climate change that need adaptation and mitigation assistance while retaining some developmental space for their industries and economies. Such victimhood is often constructed in the context of Common But Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR). South Africa’s construction as a victim prevents any critique of its own actions.

At COP17 in Durban, there were rifts across the Global North and South about the renewal of the Kyoto Protocol, seeing South Africa side with the EU, China, and India and against the US, Canada, Japan, and Australia; the latter are framed in South African news as obstructing the pathway towards a better deal, even if the real situation was considerably more complex. By the time of COP21, the Global North was portrayed as not sincere or trustworthy, and climate finance was also seen very critically. Such portrayals are ultimately also very self-serving, and disregard the Global South’s own agency in the climate emergency.