Conceptual Metaphors in Climate Change Discourse in the Speeches of African Vs. European Political Leaders: A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

This study investigates the conceptual metaphors employed by both African and European political leaders to conceptualize the process of facing climate change and reaching the goal of biodiversity in their speeches during the 26 th UN Climate Change Conference, also known as Conference of the Parties (COP 26) that took place at Glasgow in November 2021. For this end, 20 speeches were selected; 10 representing each of the two continents to identify and analyze the conceptual metaphors employed by political leaders in tackling climate change. The ten European countries are the United Kingdom,

Critical Metaphor Analysis of Climate Change in COP28 Speeches: An Ecolinguistic Perspective

“…Metaphors associated with climate change are widely studied across different fields, such as science (Nerlich & Hellsten, 2014;van der Linden, Leiserowitz, Feinberg, & Maibach, 2014), journalism and communication (Atanasova & Koteyko, 2017a;van der Hel, Hellsten, & Steen, 2018), education (Deignan, 2017;Niebert & Gropengiesser, 2013), politics (Ahmed, 2022;Al-Shboul, 2023), corporate governance (Jaworska, 2017;Kapranov, 2017), etc., and several study metaphors across different fields.…”

“…Political speeches employ narratives with the goal of engrossing the listener, conveying political ideals, and improving topic understanding (Pedersen, 2015). Thus, it has been the focus of metaphor studies (Ahmed, 2022;Ahrens, 2019;Almahasees & Mahmoud, 2022;Al-Shboul, 2023), etc., which demonstrates that metaphors in political speeches are a viable means of persuasion and should be further investigated. Speeches at the high-level segment for Heads of State and Governments at COP are national statements in which political leaders have used a variety of language and persuasion techniques to highlight the worldwide threat posed by climate change and to outline ambitious plans to control and limit the rise in global temperature (Ahmed, 2022).…”

“…Thus, it has been the focus of metaphor studies (Ahmed, 2022;Ahrens, 2019;Almahasees & Mahmoud, 2022;Al-Shboul, 2023), etc., which demonstrates that metaphors in political speeches are a viable means of persuasion and should be further investigated. Speeches at the high-level segment for Heads of State and Governments at COP are national statements in which political leaders have used a variety of language and persuasion techniques to highlight the worldwide threat posed by climate change and to outline ambitious plans to control and limit the rise in global temperature (Ahmed, 2022). Thus, they are widely studied (Ahmed, 2022;Bagozzi, 2015;Johansson, 2021;Prosser Bravo, Arboleda-Ariza, & Bonilla Hevia, 2020) as they announce national attitudes and actions toward climate change.…”

“…Speeches at the high-level segment for Heads of State and Governments at COP are national statements in which political leaders have used a variety of language and persuasion techniques to highlight the worldwide threat posed by climate change and to outline ambitious plans to control and limit the rise in global temperature (Ahmed, 2022). Thus, they are widely studied (Ahmed, 2022;Bagozzi, 2015;Johansson, 2021;Prosser Bravo, Arboleda-Ariza, & Bonilla Hevia, 2020) as they announce national attitudes and actions toward climate change. However, studies of COP speeches at the high-level segment for Heads of State and Governments need to be enriched from the perspective of metaphor analysis.…”