Human-Centered or Eco-Centered? Evaluating Anthropocentrism in Dawn’s Climate Change Discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55737/rl.2025.43098Keywords:
Anthropocentrism, Climate Change Discourse, Ecocentrism, Pakistani MediaAbstract
This paper reports on how climate change is framed in the context of Dawn, popular English-language newspaper in Pakistan through the years 2024 to 2025. Relying on the framework of Stibbe (2021), Stories We Live By, the analysis divides reporting into the anthropocentric and ecocentric types of discourse. A corpus-assisted discourse methodology was utilized; the linguistic construction of climate discourse was investigated through keyword analysis, collocation, and concordance lines using #LancsBox X (v5.5.1). The results indicate that there is an anthropocentric coverage with anthropocentric foregrounding of risks to human societies, adaptation strategies, infrastructure, and policy measures. These frames show pressing economic and social vulnerabilities yet tend to downplay the ecological interdependence by framing the environment as a setting in which human interests are expressed mostly. Less common, ecocentric, viewpoints are applied to the case of glacial melt, degradation of ecosystems and the presence of sustainable infrastructure, in which humans are viewed as components of broader systems. On the whole, the climate reports of Dawn reflect a powerful human-centered orientation with some ecocentric interludes, in general tensions in environmental communication. The promotion of the concept of a middle-ground between anthropocentric and ecocentric framings can contribute to the overall knowledge of climate change as a social and environmental problem.
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