Com­mu­ni­ca­ting the cli­ma­te cri­sis: ecocri­ti­cal dis­cour­se ana­ly­sis and di­gi­tal sto­ry­tel­ling

Cli­ma­te sci­ence has cle­ar­ly es­tab­lished human ac­ti­vi­ty as the major cause of glo­bal war­ming or cli­ma­te chan­ge. The suc­ces­si­ve re­ports of the In­ter­go­vern­men­tal Panel on Cli­ma­te Chan­ge (IPCC) have pro­vi­ded fu­ture sce­na­ri­os of the de­tri­men­tal ef­fect of ri­sing tem­pe­ra­tu­res for the years to come. It has al­rea­dy been lea­ked that he 6^th IPCC re­port, which is to be pu­blished this year, will pre­dict very dra­ma­tic sce­na­ri­os for our fu­ture and life on earth in ge­ne­ral un­less the rise of car­bon di­oxi­de in the at­mo­s­phe­re is stop­ped and re­du­ced sub­stan­ti­al­ly. How­e­ver, de­spi­te the ur­gen­cy of the pro­blem, the im­por­tance of ta­king ac­tion is dif­fi­cult to com­mu­ni­ca­te to sta­ke­hol­ders and the pu­blic.

This paper dis­cus­ses some basic is­su­es of cli­ma­te chan­ge com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on and uses qua­li­ta­ti­ve (eco)cri­ti­cal dis­cour­se ana­ly­sis to high­light com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on stra­te­gies em­ploy­ed by cli­ma­te sci­en­tists, cli­ma­te de­ni­ers and cli­ma­te ac­ti­vists, iden­ti­fy­ing si­mi­la­ri­ties and dif­fe­ren­ces in their stra­te­gies. It also looks at ways of how cli­ma­te chan­ge could be com­mu­ni­ca­ted more ef­fec­tive­ly to the ge­ne­ral pu­blic to pro­mo­te ac­tion. One of the sug­ges­ti­ons is to en­ga­ge peop­le more per­so­nal­ly and on a local level. For this pur­po­se, the me­thod of di­gi­tal sto­ry­tel­ling is pre­sen­ted. This me­thod has been ap­p­lied in the tea­ching of clas­ses on “Lan­guage and Eco­lo­gy”, yet also has the po­ten­ti­al to ac­ti­va­te the ge­ne­ral pu­blic for cli­ma­te ac­tion as it was ori­gi­nal­ly de­ve­lo­ped in com­mu­ni­ty work. In the con­text of tea­ching, this me­thod al­lows lear­ners to in­clu­de a per­so­nal per­spec­ti­ve on the issue and thus broa­dens the me­tho­do­lo­gi­cal re­per­toire by ad­ding story tel­ling to cri­ti­cal text/dis­cour­se ana­ly­sis.