Cutting emissions, halting biodiversity loss: climate change solutions in the language of UK politicians and UK climate activists, 2018–2020

Abstract Activists and politicians are important groups in the context of climate change discourse but have thus far rarely been studied in terms of their discursive constructions of climate change solutions, especially via big data methods. This paper uses a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach to analyse semantic transitivity patterns in how climate change mitigation and adaptation are discussed in two corpora of UK climate activist and parliamentary discourse, 2018–2020. A novel aspect of the methodology involves locating discursive constructions of climate change mitigation and adaptation in large datasets via verbs which semantically address climate change causes and effects. The findings reveal a degree of similarity between the two groups, occasionally suggesting that their language is similar, particularly in 2019 where, for example, discussions of fossil fuel increase from a comparatively low level in the parliamentary corpus but decrease as a percentage share from a comparatively high level in the activist corpus. However, the findings also confirm existing research that climate change activists reject hegemonic discourses to which politicians tend to adhere, such as there being a greater emphasis on economic costs and opportunities in the parliamentary corpus. Both the methodology and the findings pose questions for future research.