Climate Change in Pakistani Media: An Ecolinguistic Analysis of Dawn Climate Reports (2020–2025)

This study investigates how Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, constructed climate change between 2020 and 2025. Using a corpus-assisted ecolinguistic approach, texts were analyzed through Stibbe (2015) framework of “stories we live by,” focusing on six stories: framing, metaphor, identity, conviction, erasure and salience. LancsBox X (v5.5.1) software was employed to generate keywords, collocations, and concordances, which were then interpreted qualitatively. The findings reveal that media narratives are shaped less by neutral reporting and more by discursive strategies that foreground particular problems while sidelining others. Quantitative coding indicates that framing (28%) and identity (25%) are the prominent strategies, positioning climate change as a security, finance, and development crisis while portraying Pakistan both as a frontline victim and as a state with conditional resilience. Salience (22%) shows repeated emphasis on floods, heatwaves, and financial injustice, while metaphor (20%) dramatizes climate change through war and reckoning imagery. Visualizations, including a pie chart and year-wise bar graph, confirmed the dominance of framing and identity and showed their increase after the 2022 floods. The study concludes that Dawn’s discourse amplifies urgency and moral obligation but narrows ecological imagination by privileging finance and governance frames over community-led and ecological perspectives. By documenting what is emphasized and what is omitted, this research fills a gap in ecolinguistics and media studies. It offers a baseline for analyzing climate discourse in South Asia. It calls for a more inclusive media narrative that integrates local voices and ecological ethics alongside policy and finance.