Carbon Neutrality in Media Worldwide: A Transformation of the Climate Change Regime?

The concept of “carbon neutrality,” or “net zero,” is emerging as the central element of the international regime on climate change. How this concept is received by states and their publics will play an important role in the political conflicts surrounding the regime. This paper maps and theorizes the patterns of carbon neutrality emergence in public debates around the world. We analyze close to 3.4 million online news articles in 2018-2021 from 138 countries, jointly accounting for 94 percent of the world’s population. The empirical evidence highlights the importance of the discursive characteristics of the national climate change debates for the reception of the novel concept, but also that the effect of states’ affluence and climate vulnerability on reception of carbon neutrality is strongly non-linear. Our results demonstrate the need to equally study the Global North and South in analyses of the climate regime operation.