CONSTRUCTING CLIMATE CRISIS: A SOCIO-COGNITIVE ANALYSIS OF 2025 PAKISTAN FLOOD HEADLINES IN PAKISTANI AND INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

Pakistan generates less than one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is one of the countries most exposed to climate-related disasters, a discrepancy that raises problems of causality, responsibility and justice at the heart of flood reporting (Otto et al., 2023). This study explores the discursive construction of the 2025 Pakistan floods in two Pakistani newspapers (Dawn and The News overseas) and two overseas media (The Guardian and The New York Times) by using just Van Dijk’s (2008, 2014) Socio-Cognitive Model. We analyzed a purposive, criterion-based corpus of 67 headlines from August to December 2025 (Dawn, n = 20; The News International, n = 20; The Guardian, n = 17; The New York Times, n = 10) at three levels: textual, where lexical choice, syntax, metaphor, agency and source attribution were analyzed; cognitive, where recurrent mental models of causality, vulnerability, responsibility and justice were identified; and social, where the implications of these representations for Global North and South relations were interpreted. The analysis indicates the presence of institutional and official lexis only in the Pakistani newspapers, most notably in Dawn (45%) which presents the floods as an administratively managed emergency, while The News International demonstrates the highest proportions of explicit climate-causal lexis (30%) and adaptation and resilience lexis (35%) in a reformist, evaluative register. International newspapers were dominated by humanitarian and casualty lexis (The Guardian 64.7%; The New York Times 90.0%) and lexis of justice and accountability was rare throughout, appearing in a single headline in each of three newspapers; only The Guardian’s report of Pakistani farmers suing German polluters attributed responsibility across the North and South divide. It is suggested that flood discourse cannot be reduced to a binary conflict between Pakistani and international media, since editorial identity impacts depiction as much as geopolitical location.