From Climate Change to Global Crises. The Perspective of UNO

This study examines how institutional climate change discourse discusses the impacts of climate change on various aspects of society and is seen as a source of polycrisis. Specifically, drawing on corpus linguistics (CL), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA, and the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), I investigate all the 2023 UNO reports and documents (47 files overall; 832,801 tokens; 22,220 types) on climate change and its impact on society to analyse if, and how, climate change crises are discursively communicated in official documents. In order to do so, I concentrate on the linguistic analysis of three key terms (crisis, challenge, and burden and their plural form): by taking into consideration aspects of nomination and predication I will see if awareness of the various climate change crises is raised in UN official documents and utilizing what discursive strategies.