Human Mobility and Climate Change at the Crossroad

2021

While climate change has gradually and crucially become a 'defining symbol' of our mutual relationship with the environment, an investigation of its role in complex, multi-causal phenomena of human mobility has emerged as a salient policy-making issue only during the last years, with the period between the Cancun negotiations of the UNFCCC in 2010 and the 2015 Paris negotiations representing a crucial moment in policy making as regards the climate change and migration nexus. The purpose of the article is to explore representations of migration and displacement in the context of anthropogenic climate change in newspaper discourse through a critical diachronic corpus-assisted discourse analytical perspective. For the purpose of this study, a diachronic, domain-specific corpus of newspaper articles from a selection of UK and US broadsheets has been gathered through the Nexis online searchable database. Particular attention is placed on whether any significant discursive shifts ...

Based on Goffman’s definition that frames are general ‘schemata of interpretation’ that people use to ‘locate, perceive, identify, and label’, other scholars have used the concept in a more specific way to analyze media coverage. Frames are used in the sense of organizing devices that allow journalists to select and emphasise topics, to decide ‘what matters’ (Gitlin 1980). Gamson and Modigliani (1989) consider frames as being embedded within ‘media packages’ that can be seen as ‘giving meaning’ to an issue. According to Entman (1993), framing comprises a combination of different activities such as: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. Previous research has analysed climate change with the purpose of testing Downs’s model of the issue attention cycle (Trumbo 1996), to uncover media biases in the US press (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004), to highlight differences between nations (Brossard et al. 2004; Grundmann 2007) or to analyze cultural reconstructions of scientific knowledge (Carvalho and Burgess 2005). In this paper we shall present data from a corpus linguistics-based approach. We will be drawing on results of a pilot study conducted in Spring 2008 based on the Nexis news media archive. Based on comparative data from the US, the UK, France and Germany, we aim to show how the climate change issue has been framed differently in these countries and how this framing indicates differences in national climate change policies.

This paper aims at investigating the meanings of global warming in three discourses represented by three prestige newspapers: the Guardian, the Washington Post and the People's Daily. To suit this, a diachronic corpus which includes the articles in which global warming occurs at least once in these newspapers during the last 20 years is built and this corpus is further divided into different time periods based on frequency explosions of the articles concerned. Thus, comparisons of the meaning constructions of global warming both between three newspapers and between different time periods are displayed. It is found that in the Guardian discourse, global warming is represented as an accepted fact, while the Washington Post discourse remains sceptical. People's Daily also constructs global warming as an irrefutable fact, and it highlights China's contribution to this problem. This paper argues that corpus plays a central role in discovering meanings of discourse objects.

Text & Talk, 2022

Building on our previous work investigating discourses of climate-induced mobility in the UK and US press, this paper addresses the overarching theme of environmental issues and the anthropocene by looking into representations of migration as adaptation in the context of climate change. In particular, drawing on corpus-assisted discourse analysis methodologies, the paper will focus on, and critically explore, meaning patterns of “risk” and “resilience” in a purpose-built diachronic corpus of quality newspapers from the Global North and the Global South between 2010 and 2017. Risk and resilience may in fact be regarded as the defining – though problematic – terms of our anthropogenic era. The investigation focuses on whether and how any significant discursive shifts may be identified in newspaper discourse across the globe and the extent to which the mainstream press reflects this problematicity. Our main findings show that not only is mention of risk more frequent in the Global Nort...

Text & Talk, 2022

Building on our previous work investigating discourses of climate-induced mobility in the UK and US press, this paper addresses the overarching theme of environmental issues and the anthropocene by looking into representations of migration as adaptation in the context of climate change. In particular, drawing on corpus-assisted discourse analysis methodologies, the paper will focus on, and critically explore, meaning patterns of “risk” and “resilience” in a purpose-built diachronic corpus of quality newspapers from the Global North and the Global South between 2010 and 2017. Risk and resilience may in fact be regarded as the defining – though problematic – terms of our anthropogenic era. The investigation focuses on whether and how any significant discursive shifts may be identified in newspaper discourse across the globe and the extent to which the mainstream press reflects this problematicity. Our main findings show that not only is mention of risk more frequent in the Global Nort...

The following research aims to focus on the legal steps taken by the international community in the definition and identification of climate-induced migration. As an international legal framework is still missing, the challenges posited by environmental changes are often addressed in the decisions adopted by the Conference of the Parties (COP), the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). These decisions are used to implement, from a legal perspective, what previous international laws and regulations lack, as is the case with climate-induced migrants. Therefore, a corpus collating the decisions adopted by the COP (spanning from COP3, which took place from 1 to 10 December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, to COP23, which was held from 6 to 17 November 2017 in Bonn, Germany) will be analysed by using Corpus Linguistics methodologies. The online corpus analysis platform Sketch Engine will be used to address the discursive construction of the environmental challenges discussed diachronically under the COP decisions. In this way, the following investigation will discuss the complex legal challenges associated with climate change-induced displacement under international law. Additionally, the paper also addresses terminological issues linked to the very definition of people who are forced to be displaced due to climate change-related problems. Therefore, a web-based corpus will be analysed to see how climate-induced migrants are defined and discursively constructed in the online environment.

In early 2011, the popular German weekly Der Spiegel asked on its website: “Where are all the environmental refugees?“ (cf. Bojanowski, 2011). It was referring to a prediction made in 2005 by the United Nations University (UNU) and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) that warned of the existence of up to 50 million environmental refugees by 2010. Der Spiegel noted that, despite the doomsday prophecies of these UN agencies, there is no real evidence of changes in global migratory patterns and behavior, specifically in the form of growing migration rates in the context of climate change-related environmental change. In this article, Der Spiegel journalists picked up on a strand of debate that is being pursued in a number of different settings: the relation between global climate change and migration. For several decades, this debate has featured prominently in many contexts. It comes up regularly at international climate policy events (for example at COP 15 in Copenhagen) and also fuels public debates on potential societal impacts of global climate change. It is regularly referred to in mass media, as well as policy circles and public statements of politicians. At the same time, the issue has been subject to an intense debate in different scientific communities, from the natural sciences, to geography, the political sciences, and migration research. The debate and its critique served as a starting point for conceptualizing a workshop entitled Denaturalizing Climate Change: Migration, Mobilities and Spaces that took place at the artec Sustainability Research Center, University of Bremen in October 2013. The aim was to revisit the nexus between climate change and human mobility, employing innovative and, above all, more politicized approaches. Among the broader debates on climate change adaptation, there is evidence of both over-politicization and a de-politicization of the far-reaching social, political and legal consequences of global climate change. On the one hand, research from various disciplines often focuses on the formal transnational negotiations and international climate policy institutions. This growing research field is, intrinsically, highly politicized. On the other hand, debates are de-politicized from a more theoretical point of view. Very often, questions on the social impacts of environmental change are detached from the political and social contexts in which those impacts come to play, and from the debates around climate justice that infuse all climate change negotiations. In our view, environmental change is always simultaneously a natural and a social phenomenon. This applies both to the causes of change and to societal responses, including increasing mobility. In line with conceptual frameworks that refer to social natures (Castree & Braun, 2001) and the societal relationships with nature (Görg, 2004), we argue that it is important to consider the social constructions and cultural readings of environmental change. Specifically, our aim has been to analyze the evolving co-production of social order and natural order with respect to the relationship between environmental change and human mobility. In contrast, the current debates on growing refugee flows in the context of global warming often neglect or cover up this process of co-production and conceptualize nature as being detached from social and political processes.

2021

This thesis is based on a corpus-assisted Ecolinguistic Discourse study and explores the discourse on environmental migration of international organisations and selected newspaper outlets. It is based on the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and adopts a socio-cultural approach to the study of discourse and its relationship with socio-cultural behaviour. It has a major focus on representations of the ecological and humanitarian aspects of environmental migration. The study investigates and discusses written representations of environmental migration, migrant and host communities, and the role of the climate and environment in this phenomenon. More specifically, it focuses on representations shaped by authoritative international organisations and newspaper outlets, two \u201cvoices\u201d which are often representative of dominant discourses on this phenomenon. The methodology adopted for the analysis is based on corpus-assisted eco-critical discourse analysis of tw...

Communications, 2016

Uncertainty is intrinsic to science, to knowledge acquisition and risk assessment. When communicating about climate change, however, uncertainty can be used and understood as ‘not knowing’, that is, as ignorance. In this article we aim to understand how ‘uncertainty’ is used in a specific cultural and media context at two important periods in time. Using a corpus linguistic approach, we examine how ‘uncertainty’ was used in the context of UK press coverage of climate change in 2010 (following ‘Climategate’) and in 2014−15, after the latest IPCC report had been published. We find that after Climategate and the (failed) Copenhagen summit, ‘uncertainty’ was used to question the authority and credibility of climate science; after the latest IPCC report and in the run-up to the (more successful) Paris summit, discussions focused on uncertainties inherent in various climate change mitigation activities and associated with the economy, environment and politics more generally.

Journal of Risk Research, 2021

This paper explores the contribution of software-based tools that are increasingly used for the semi-automated analysis of large volumes of text, especially Topic Modelling and Corpus Linguistics. These tools highlight the potential of getting interesting and new insights quickly, but at a cost. Linguistic aspects need to be considered carefully if computer-assisted technologies are to provide valid and reliable results. Main features of these tools will be presented, and some general problems and limitations will be discussed. The relation between technical tools and theoretical frameworks is discussed. The main empirical reference is the case of climate change.