Environment, Climate and Health at the Crossroads: A Critical Analysis of Public Policy and Political Communication Discourse in the EU

In 2015, the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change concluded that “anthropogenic climate change threatens to undermine the past 50 years of gains in public health, and conversely, that a comprehensive response to climate change could be ‘the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century” (Nick Watts et al. 2017: 591). Indeed, the need for better-informed deliberation and decision-making in regard to health threats associated with climate change came to the fore as a new geopolitical “game-changer”, the Covid-19 pandemic, unsettled the way we approach the relationship between health and the environment, arguably setting it as a defining aspect of a ‘new normal’. This paper is concerned with theories and methodologies of critical discourse analysis and their contribution to climate change, environmental and health policy research in the European Union (Krzyzanowski 2015). It is based on a view of policy-making in which “deliberation and decision-making in contexts of uncertainty, risk and persistent disagreement” are fundamentally based on the social construction of meaning (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012: 17). The purpose of the paper is to explore patterns of change and/or continuity in the linguistic constructions of the climate, environment and health nexus preceding and following covid-19 crisis. It will focus on a specialized diachronic corpus (2010-2021) purposefully compiled for this study, including key policy documents related to the environment and press releases, speeches and statements. In this we move from the assumption that policy analysis “includes but extends beyond laws and legislation” (Bacchi 2009, 2016), covering not only binding documents, but also the bulk of text and talk that constitute institutional communication, which has acquired increasing importance in reinforcing linkages between institutions and citizens (Bee 2010; Cap and Okulska ). The study adopts an ‘eclectic’ approach (Baker 2006: 16 Baker et al., 2008), by combining the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics with the theoretical and analytical framework of critical discourse studies. Corpus linguistics methodological tools such as quantitative techniques (lists of frequency, statistical significance, concordances and collocational analysis) have been combined in the present study with the analysis of context and discourse structural evaluation through qualitative assessments.