A cross-disciplinary perspective on climate change discourse

Tackling climate change constitutes one of the most pressing issues facing humanity today. Opinions and attitudes on important questions in this context are represented in multiple contemporary discourses. These discourses take many forms and are characterised by intricate multivoicedness. Divergent and convergent voices (scholars from different fields, politicians, NGOs, media, citizens) are variously represented, explicitly or implicitly. Accounting for such discourses, their role in societal and individual interactions and their influence on opinions and actions, presents a major challenge for linguistic and discursive analysis and invites to cross-disciplinary research. In the first part of this article I will present some of the main components of the cross-disciplinary project LINGCLIM, discuss reasons for developing the cross-disciplinary collaboration and introduce some general thoughts about challenges and opportunities in this kind of collaboration (section 2). In the second part I will present some results from the project, with a focus on two areas: first, an introduction to what we have called “climate change narratives”, mostly limited to the textual level of analysis (section 3); and second, a presentation of some case studies, including a discussion of the notion “survey discourse”, corresponding to citizens’ freely formulated answers to open-ended survey questions related to the issue of climate change (section 4). I will end by some final remarks on cross-disciplinarity and the mutual benefits for both linguistics and political science (section 5).