Words Count: The Role of Language in Overcoming Climate Inertia

Abstract

The meaning people attribute to climate change is closely related to the way it is formulated and presented by communicators. This, as research has widely proved, is highly influential on how citizens then take action to mitigate it. The chapter analyzes the climate change discourse in Italian newspapers. At first, it provides an overview on how it has been depicted in the last 30 years, essentially following the global discourse evolution and reflecting key international climate events. Then, the chapter introduces a more in-depth analysis of climate change metaphorical representation in one of the most popular national newspapers, La Repubblica. Through the critical analysis approach, we detected the illness, journey, and war metaphors in 1022 articles published between 2019 and 2020. A significant presence of war metaphors was observed, showing how the climate crisis—and the same happens with Covid-19 starting from 2020—tends to be described with a sense of emergency, fueling a divisive atmosphere.Finally, our research shows how the Italian climate change narrative tends to follow global trends, adopting linguistic devices and linking the crisis mainly to global and far-away events, thus failing to intercept local experiences, possibly hindering citizens' and communities' proactive response.