Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation – The Centrality Of Carbon Clusters And Creativity In Climate Change Adaptation And Mitigation: A Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

The notion of carbon is quite central to climate change mitigation and adaptation programmes. Although carbon is one of the harmful gases that drive the climate change scourge, it is the lexical creativity around the word carbon that brings out some comic reliefs in a seemingly complex and confusing situation. The word carbon may be modeled around several clusters such as the Moral and Religious Cluster (carbon sinner, carbon guilty or carbon criminal), Dietary Cluster (low-carbon diet, carbon calories), the Financial Cluster (carbon trading, carbon finance or carbon markets) and the Political cluster (carbon neutrality, carbon battle, carbon war).Climate change documents, texts, pamphlets and briefings fall under the descriptive survey (qualitative methodology). Approaches such as Document Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis and Text Analysis will be used to find the Communicative Functions of these carbon clusters. Interview techniques will be used to probe the policy makers and environmental officials on the contribution of these clusters in adaptation and mitigation programmes. The analytic approaches will be used in relation to ethnography of communication in order to evaluate the socioeconomic status, cultural and ethical implications of the society. The ideological orientations of the climate change carbon clusters will be analyzed in relation to the major emitting nations.