Climate change is shaking societal foundations on the deepest level by confronting our relationship with nature, with each other, and even with ourselves. How we handle this situation will not only affect life in the present, but also the future of life. Focusing on the nationally determined contributions (NDCs), national documents outlining mitigation and adaptation efforts reported to the United Nations in accordance with the Paris Agreement of 2015, I have identified several linguistic patterns that I argue not only maintain the status quo but also reinforce the damaging human habits that have created the current crisis. Using discourse, appraisal, and metaphor analysis, I conclude that the prevalent worldview is one of separation. There is a division between nature and humans, where we do not take responsibility for damages inflicted on other lifeforms, as well as between nations and individuals. We also separate emotional from rational thoughts, preferring the latter and shunning the former while telling ourselves a story where humans are still the protagonist. All the while treating nature, along with the negative effects of climate change, as a business opportunity. While these destructive patterns might cast a dark shadow on the future, they also shed light on how we can use language to break away from the mould and create a new narrative through devices such as storytelling, listening, and by actively questioning our interactions with nature. Gradually reconstructing our relationship with the biosphere to become one based on care rather than careless consumption.

As climate change becomes more destructive to our planet, some governments have taken action towards a more sustainable future. One being the UK, where a Climate Emergency was declared in 2019, which affects public corporations and news outlets. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how do news reports portray natural disasters from an eco-linguistic perspective. This qualitative study focuses on analysing data regarding the 2019-2020 wildfires in Australia through the linguistic choices made in the texts by incorporating a combination of corpus linguistics, eco-linguistics and media discourse. The corpus under investigation consists of 41,055 words collected from 4 different UK-based news outlets. In order to analyse the data, I chose three search words (fire, climate and animal) to further investigate by using both corpus- and eco-linguistics. The results showcase a consistent pattern within the selected search words: fire and climate are portrayed as threats whereas animals are portrayed as victims. Yet, the most remarkable finding is regarding climate, as it is viewed as a cause rather than an effect caused by human actions. This study is a step towards a better understanding of climate change in news reporting; providing an insight on what the discourse is lacking but should be included.