The Framing of Climate Change Discourse by Greenpeace Africa

Abstract

The issue of climate change has been at the forefront of a number of nongovernmental environmental organisations, such as Greenpeace and its national branches, for instance, Greenpeace Africa (Pandey, 2015). Located in Johannesburg in South Africa, Greenpeace Africa (further – GA) aims “to bring forth the solutions which are essential to a green and peaceful future” (Greenpeace Africa, 2024). One of the major foci of GA’s environmental campaigns for a green future involves the issue of climate change. To-date, however, little is known about how GA frames its climate change communication, especially on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), such as Facebook. The present study seeks to fill the current gap in scholarship by collecting and analysing a corpus of GA’s Facebook status updates on climate change in order to shed light onto this under-researched issue. In the study, the corpus is analysed qualitatively by means of applying framing methodology (Entman, 1993, 2004, 2007, 2010). The results of the corpus analysis have revealed that GA frames its climate change communication on Facebook by a number of frames that are further discussed in the article.