Coverage of tourism and climate change issues in the French news media: An exploratory lexico-semantic approach

This article examines how the French news media addressed the relationship between tourism and climate change between 2020 and 2025, a period marked by the COVID-19 crisis and intensified climate debates. Drawing on environmental communication and tourism studies, it explores how the media frame these issues, and the extent to which they mobilize scientific knowledge about tourism, climate change, and sustainability transitions. The study adopts an exploratory approach, building a corpus of 198 articles published in generalist and specialized French newspapers, collected via Europresse and Google News. It does not claim to measure the large-scale dissemination of science in the French media, but rather to produce a lexical mapping of a topic that remains understudied in France. Using IRaMuTeQ software and descending hierarchical classification (DHC), the analysis identifies seven lexical classes. The results reveal a dual configuration. A distinct class contains climate-science terminology, suggesting that some scientific concepts are present in the selected coverage. Yet coverage remains fragmented and sectoral, focusing on air travel, cruise tourism, ski resorts, coastal areas, and overtourism, while structural and political dimensions stay marginal. By interpreting media lexical patterns in relation to selected scientific literature, this study documents how tourism-related climate issues are selectively translated in the French press.