Climate Change and Climate Justice: a terminological approach to Environmental Studies

"Climate change is a good magnifying glass for us to use in a more forensic examination than we have been used to of each of these projects - economic growth, free trade, povery reduction, community-building, demografic management, social health, and more. Let's use the magnifying power of Climate Change […] to attend more closely to what we really want to achieve for humanity: affluence, justice or mere survival" (Hulme 2007). In recent decades, the environment has become a central topic for societies worldwide, and specific attention to climate change, biodiversity loss, air pollution and other related issues has relatively increased. From international policies to local activism, the call for sustainable action is now stronger than ever. As those phenomena intensify, the way institutions communicate information about the environment plays a vital role: for this reason, multiple environmental concepts have been analyzed in this study specifically for this domain, including climate change and climate justice. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate environmental terminology, and to make this specific type of terminology more accessible to a general audience through a contrastive analysis of the main concepts of this domain. It is divided into four chapters: the first chapter outlines the domain of the research - environmental science - and its subsequent sub-domains, climate change and climate justice. The second chapter introduces the theoretical foundations of terminology, with particular focus on the General Theory of Terminology (GTT) established by Eugen Wüster, and the Frame-Based Terminology (FBT) established by Pamela Faber. The third chapter includes the practical application of terminological theories, such as a concept system and two lexical networks in Italian and English (US) created with concepts and terms extracted by the parallel bilingual corpus. Finally, the fourth chapter analyses the concept entries compiled on the platform FAIRterm 2.0, which also helps to describe the linguistic characteristics and differences of the environmental concepts found in this study. The findings show that environmental terminology is recognized through the application of specific linguistic phenomena - above them nominalization, formal register, morphological derivation, intertextuality, numerous logic linkers, and calquing. In conclusion, this study reflects the practical application of terminology in environmental studies, as it demonstrates that this discipline is essential to address global challenges, such as climate change and climate justice, by standardizing and contextualizing the language used in environmental discourse by researchers and policy makers. Most importantly, the results show that fostering a clear communication can highly facilitate international cooperation and drive effective solutions towards sustainable development and environmental action.