Manipulating climate change discourse: how airlines re-present topic and data

Discourse on environmental sustainability has been often linked to aviation whose technology and communication strategies strongly impact climate change debate (among others Goodman 2009, Gössling & Peeters 2007, Hupe 2001, Upham et al. 2003, Walker & Cook 2009). The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is the United Nations’ body that aims to implement global standards in civil air transportation. After 2010’s ICAO Assembly resolution A37-19 (ICAO A37-19), airlines started to include in their documents to stakeholders discussions about their environmental impact beyond the issues of noise abatement and local air quality to encompass more global themes. The discourse of six airlines about environmental protection has been analyzed on the basis of two subsets of features: textual-semantic features include terms of comparison, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, numerical data format; pragmatic features include presuppositions, and entailments. The results of the analysis uncover how airlines’ business and linguistic strategies are aimed to transfer responsibility and commitment onto passengers and governmental bodies, to present data in a way greener than it really is, and to water the topic down with commitment in other areas of Corporate Social Responsibility.