Assessing the effectiveness of corporate communication on climate change

The global temperature records set in 2023 represent a pressing concern for the international community and a salient topic of investigation in various research areas, including the field of climate change communication. Drawing upon a combination of analytical methodologies, researchers in this area focus on the role of language in the construction of communicative strategies and tools that are used with environmental issues. A considerable contribution in this regard has come from Fløttum and Gjerstad (2017) who illustrate how different approaches can be applied as analytical tools “to explore the impacts of conflicting narratives (frames) on public opinion, attitudes, emotions, and behavior” (p. 2) towards climate change as manifested in different genres and discourses, including corporate discourse. Taking the cue from this research area, in this presentation we adopt a methodology based on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2013; Fuoli and Beelitz 2023), Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (Gillings et al. 2023), Discourse of Climate Delay (Lamb et al. 2020), Impression Management (Hooghiemstra 2000), and Visual Semiotics in corporate-related contexts (Koller 2009; Malavasi 2018) to verify the effectiveness of discourse practices, both verbal and non-verbal, with a focus on speech acts, modality and hedging, images, word patterns and neo-semantic formations, employed by energy companies to cope with the issue of climate vulnerability and climate change in corporate communication genres. Are these practices purely rhetorical? Or, do they really contribute to and support the environmental cause? The study is carried out on a corpus consisting of Sustainability Reports and Letters to the Shareholders issued by major energy companies since 2002.