Carbon neutrality in the media in Europe and worldwide: A transformation of the climate change regime

The concept of carbon neutrality has rapidly become a cornerstone of contemporary climate policy — but how exactly has it entered the public imagination around the world? In a seminar on 22 October at the ESC, Jakub Tesař and Michal Parizek of Charles University (Prague) presented cutting-edge research into how carbon neutrality is discussed in global media, and what this tells us about the evolving international climate regime. The seminar was chaired by Federica Genovese (St Antony's College).

Their presentation, titled 'Carbon neutrality in the media worldwide: A transformation of the climate change regime?', explored the emergence and visibility of carbon neutrality in public discourse across 138 countries, accounting for 94% of the global population. Drawing on an original dataset of over 3.4 million news articles published between 2018 and 2021 — and supplemented with data through 2024 — the speakers analysed how this key climate concept appears in the media and the wider environmental discourses in which it is embedded.Theoretical framework: Norms, fit, and visibility
Tesař and Parizek approach carbon neutrality as an emerging international aspirational norm, rather than a fixed behavioural commitment. The key question is not whether states are meeting CN targets, but how the concept circulates and takes hold within national public debates. For a new norm to take root, they argue, it must first become visible, and that visibility is closely tied to how well the norm fits into existing social and material contexts.

They distinguish between two types of "fit":

• Social fit: the degree to which a country’s climate change debate is broad, conceptually rich, and connected to global discussions.
• Material fit: a country’s environmental vulnerability and socio-economic conditions — particularly affluence, which may signal both resources and post-material values.

In their model, visibility of carbon neutrality in media coverage is a crucial proxy for the norm’s emergence.

 
Method and data: AI-assisted global media analysis
The research draws on news media in 63 languages, from more than 2,200 online sources, selected using Amazon Alexa rankings and human validation. Machine translation was used to bring the material into English, and concept detection was carried out using a mix of dictionary-based analysis and LLM (large language model) classification, including GPT-4. They coded for the presence of climate change, carbon neutrality, and four major environmental discourses:

• Ecological modernisation
• Environmental management
• Environmental justice
• Bio-environmentalism

These discourses were used as indicators of how conceptually rich a national debate was — in other words, how fertile the ground might be for new ideas like carbon neutrality.

 
Key findings: Who talks about carbon neutrality — and why?
Between 2018 and 2021, the visibility of carbon neutrality in global media increased dramatically. But this rise was uneven. Carbon neutrality was most visible in media from countries where:

• Climate change was widely discussed,
• A variety of environmental discourses were present,
• Public debate was informed by international peers, and
• Economic affluence and climate vulnerability coincided.

Interestingly, they found a curvilinear relationship between affluence and CN visibility — suggesting that both very rich and moderately vulnerable countries were more likely to talk about carbon neutrality, compared to very poor or very rich-and-insulated ones.

 
Zooming in on Europe
The latter part of the seminar focused on Europe. Compared to other world regions, Europe has relatively high levels of carbon neutrality visibility, although with variation across subregions. Western and Northern Europe showed the highest levels of media attention to CN, while Southern Europe lagged somewhat. The researchers also noted a recent flattening or even decline in coverage, as carbon neutrality competes with other political agendas in the public sphere — a particularly relevant dynamic in the context of the 2024 European Parliament elections.

Their analysis cautions against assuming a smooth or universal uptake of carbon neutrality as a policy norm. In many countries — especially outside the Global North — the term remains underutilised or contested. This highlights the need for globally inclusive analysis of climate discourse, rather than assumptions based on Euro-American trends.

 
A broader agenda
This research forms part of the broader GLOWIN project (Global Flows of Political Information), which maps how international political concepts and narratives travel across borders. Other strands of this project have examined media coverage of international organisations, the EU in polycrisis, and the global narratives around the war in Ukraine.

In concluding, Tesař and Parizek emphasised that understanding the media visibility of carbon neutrality is not simply about tracking buzzwords — it’s about tracing the formation of a shared language of climate governance. As the international community grapples with the challenge of aligning policy ambition with public support, the ways in which key concepts are framed and received in national debates will remain a crucial area for research.