(De)Colonizing Climate Discourse: Alternative Narratives and Multi-Level Framing of Net Zero Across the Global North and South (2015–2024)

Climate colonialism arises from global hegemony in climate politics, yet we know little about how it shapes media narratives about net zero, a core and ongoing climate goal that cannot be achieved without global collaboration. This study analyzes how news media frame net zero and whether the distribution of coverage across the Global North and South reinforces or challenges climate colonialism. We conducted a multi-level framing analysis (keywords-topics-frames) on 10,532 net zero news articles from 10 countries between 2015 and 2024 (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore, China, India, Brazil, South Africa), and propose a PLANET framework of net zero news frames based on BERTopic modeling, containing Politics, Linkage, Actions, Nature, Economics, and Technology. The findings indicate that Global North media dominated overall issue attention and led the discussion, even when the topic focused on the Global South. Global North media invariably relied on the Politics frame, but Global South media actively decolonized climate discourse by adopting locally-curated, solution-focused frames that emphasized development, ecosystems, or infrastructure. This study provides a transnational, longitudinal framework for analyzing net zero news, and shows how climate colonialism and alternative narratives are depicted in favor of a more equitable climate agenda.