Abstract
Over the past few decades, climate change has emerged as a pressing international issue, requiring global, collective action and international cooperation. However, this process of ensuring cooperation and collective action has been fraught with tensions since the formation of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and the first Conference of Parties (CoP) held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. Several issues of contention have emerged during international negotiations on climate change, including the question of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), technological transfer, and timelines for emissions reductions.
These negotiations surrounding climate change have revealed significant tensions among various stakeholders, primarily between the developed nations in the Global North and developing countries in the Global South. The terms "Global North" and "Global South" are highly contested and some scholars even suggest that they be retired, but we will be using them in the context of historical and economic disparities that shape climate negotiations. The Global North comprises industrialized nations such as the United States, Canada, Japan, and much of Europe, while the Global South includes South Asian countries, Africa, and parts of Latin America. Historically, the Global North has been responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions, while the poorer Global South countries have been disproportionately affected. The position of Russia in this debate is a little unclear, but for this paper, we will consider it as one of the countries of the Global South, as in recent times its economy is more similar to those nations and it does not benefit from the global capitalist system like other countries of the Global North.
In this paper, we conduct a computational analysis of the North-South climate debate by examining discourse in YouTube videos. YouTube is chosen as the primary source because it has a vast global reach and serves as a platform where both policymakers and the general public engage in climate discourse. Using a dataset of videos scraped from the platform, we analyze how climate change narratives differ by identifying key themes.
During the past 30 years, global climate change negotiations have been shaped by several key events that have been pivotal turning points in the North-South debate. For this study, we have selected seven such moments that highlighted the evolution of climate governance and brought the tensions between developed and developing nations to the forefront:
Kyoto Protocol (1997)
CBDR-COP13 (2007)
Copenhagen Accord-COP15 (2009)
Green Climate Fund (2010)
Paris Agreement (2015)
UN Climate Action Summit (2019)
COP28 (2023)
For each of these events, we generate five different search queries such as initiatives, goals, outcomes, highlights, and summaries to retrieve relevant video content from YouTube. Using these queries, we scrape approximately the top 400 most relevant videos per event. Once collected, the videos are categorized based on the geographic location from which they were posted, dividing them into two groups: Global North and Global South.
Next, we extract transcripts from these videos, creating a textual corpus for further analysis. Words that occur in more than 80% of the documents are filtered out to ensure that the analysis focuses on meaningful, event-specific terms rather than common, high-frequency words. We employ multiple natural language processing tools to examine the corpus. Initially, a basic bag-of-words approach is applied to identify frequently occurring terms and patterns within each group. Following this, we apply topic modeling techniques to extract central themes associated with each event, separately for the Global North and Global South.
Most of the videos that are obtained are from the United States, Canada, India, Russia, Australia, China, and Brazil. For each event, we get five topics each for the Global North and Global South. These topics are represented as a list of commonly occurring words within the corpus collected. Table 1 highlights a few words from the most commonly occurring topics in the videos collected from each event.
Overall, words like greenhouse gases, fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and renewable solutions are used by the Global North in this discussion, while words like development, change, reduce, commitment, and mitigation stand out from the Global South. Words like target, decision, agenda are used a lot more frequently by the North as compared to countries from the South, which exhibits a call for structured policy commitments, technological advancements, and market-driven solutions to address climate change. The repeated use of policy and adaptation-related terms by the Global South, along with more frequent mentions of extreme weather events, highlights their emphasis on the disproportionate impact of climate change faced by vulnerable populations and the need for financial and technological assistance from developed nations.
Topics from the Global North revolve more around scientific and developmental terms, and in contrast, topics from the Global South indicate a stronger focus on economic growth, climate resilience, and financial support. This divide extends to conversations on responsibility and negotiation, where the Global North frames climate action in terms of obligations and policy frameworks, while the Global South emphasizes financial and policy mechanisms for adaptation and mitigation rather than binding commitments to reduce emissions.
Governance discussions further highlight this contrast. While the North focuses on international commitments, the South stresses immediate needs and the impact on vulnerable populations. The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a stark example of this divide, with the Global North engaging in discussions about bureaucratic hurdles and funding mechanisms, while the Global South focuses on financial accessibility and the struggle to secure promised funds.
This analysis of climate change narratives across the Global North and Global South reveals patterns that are consistent with what scholars have long observed in climate negotiations. There is a persistent tension in discussions involving responsibility, financial commitments, and governance priorities. The Global North has insisted that they want to see equal commitments to reduce emissions from every country that is currently responsible. Some even maintain that their way of life is "non-negotiable." On the other hand, Global South countries push for the principle of CBDR, prioritizing development and demanding "justice," arguing that the Global North should compensate for its historical role.
These narratives and ideological divides that have persisted for decades emerge in media content, reinforcing broader academic discussions on global climate change narratives. This aligns with the theories of "environmental colonialism," where wealthier nations, which are historically bigger contributors, continue to push for an equal responsibility agenda, shifting accountability onto the Global South. These findings also exhibit the theory of "environmentalism of the poor" in the way the Global South discusses its need for financial and technological support for development.
Our study demonstrates that these disparities are not only present in policy discussions but also extend into digital media, where YouTube reflects the same global power struggles and economic inequalities seen in the North-South climate debates. It also demonstrates the potential for YouTube videos to be used as a primary source of data for analyzing public discourse.
