The international regime on climate change, based on the nationally determined contributions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, heavily depends on norms shared by the international community. Recently, the public debate has been influenced by the concept of carbon neutrality (also known as net zero) which quickly spread among countries. We map the emergence and diffusion of the new concept and compare it to the general visibility of climate change topics in the public debate. We hypothesize that countries with more prominent climate change debates will also belong among early adaptors of commitment to carbon neutrality. The paper builds on a novel dataset, collected as part of the Global Flows of Information (GLOWIN) research project, which assess how politically-relevant topics are reflected in media worldwide. It consists of more than 8 million carefully sampled online media articles from almost 200 countries and 65 languages, which are translated to English for dictionary-based text analysis. We use data from 2018 to 2021 to trace the salience of climate change in the public debate, and compare it to the emergence of the concept of carbon neutrality. We further analyse the sentiment of reporting on the other countries to show how countries that are fundamental for the success of the international regime (China, EU, USA, India, Brazil) are perceived with respect to their actions on climate change in different parts of the world.