From Climate Change to Global Crises. The Perspective of UNO

Goal 13 of the UNO Agenda 2030 highlights the urgent threat of climate change and its far-reaching consequences for both nature and society. To encourage action on climate change, the UNO Agenda 2030 redirects to the ACT NOW campaign site and the Climate Change website. Drawing on corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and specifically the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), the aim of this chapter is to analyse if, and how, crises deriving from climate change are discursively communicated in official 2023 UNO documents. In order to do so, I concentrate on the linguistic analysis of three key terms (crisis and crises, challenge(s), and burden(s)): by taking into consideration aspects of nomination and predication, I will see if, in official UN documents, awareness of the various climate change crises is raised, and which discursive strategies are employed when discussed. Results seem to indicate that responsibility for the processes indicated in UNO documents is never specified. Instances of personification, passivization, and nominalization contribute to making the texts vaguer in terms of social actors’ responsibility, thus hiding agency and systematically relegating responsibility for actions to the background.