Living Well, Within the Limits of Our Planet: Terms in EU Press Releases

Recent EU measures such as strategies and action programmes aimed at mitigating the impact of climate change have often highlighted the role of knowledge management and divulgation in achieving environmental goals. For instance, ‘better informed decision-making’ was defined as one of the main objectives of the EU strategy on adaptation to climate change (2013). Similarly, in January 2014 the EU commission announced the 7th Environmental Action, which identified the following key enablers: “better information by improving the knowledge base; more and wiser investment for environment and climate policy; and the full integration of environmental requirements and considerations into other policies” (2014). As a consequence, the climate science domain has greatly expanded in the inter-institutional terminology database, Inter-Active Terminology for Europe (IATE). In addition, the European Climate Adaptation Glossary was published in 2013. As clearly stated in the webpage description, the differing use of terms and the consequent terminological variation within/across texts by different organizations interacting in the climate change “discourse community” (Swales 1990) are regarded as a socio-economic liability. Yet while the debate on climate change argumentation has been explored in expert and non-expert debates (Smart 2011), the reasons for the instability and ‘fuzziness’ of climate-change terms in European media and political discourse remains somehow underexplored. In order to test whether the EU commission discourse community adopts the specialized terms it has agreed upon in communicating with its citizens, a corpus (EU Press Releases Corpus, henceforth EUPRC), was specifically compiled to represent climate change terms in EU media discourse in the years 1996-1997 and 2014-2015. The analysis tested the dynamic nature of terms related to climate change in EU Commission press communications, in particular press releases, where the employment of terms may be analysed as authentic instances of use (Swales 1990). It is the contention of the article that press releases may be analysed in terms of the selection of terms to convey attitude and evaluation towards socio-political agendas and to promote community building (Tilakaratna and Ahmar Mahboob 2013, 64).