Responsibility, Sustainability, and Threat: The Framing of Climate Change by King Charles III

Abstract

The issue of climate change is reflective of a cornucopia of interconnected variables, which involve political, societal, as well as ethical and moral considerations associated with empathy, responsibility, sustainability, and solidarity (Sadler-Smith & Akstinaite 2022). Due to these reasons, research in climate change discourse has gained currency in the present-day linguistic and mass media studies. One of the means of exploring how corporate and political actors view the issue of global climate change involves framing, which is copiously applied in linguistic, mass media, and discourse-related research directions (Gillings & Dayrell 2024; Schlichting 2013). To-date, however, little is known about how climate change discourse is framed by the current British monarch King Charles III. This contribution presents a qualitative study that explores the way climate change discourse is framed by King Charles III. The study involves a corpus of speeches on the topic of climate change delivered by King Charles III from 2005 to 2023. The corpus was analysed qualitatively in line with the framing methodology developed by Entman (1993, 2004, 2007). The analysis revealed that climate change was framed as A 2 Degree World, Deforestation, Responsibility, Risk, Sustainability, Threat, and Urgency. The findings and their discussion are further described in the article.