Scientific Notes of Vinnytsia Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi State Pedagogical University. Series: Philology (Linguistics)

Collection of Scientific Papers

No. 40 (2025)
Cognitive and communicative-pragmatic aspects of linguistics

Climate change discourse by the British Ministry of Defence: The framing of the 2024 report

https://doi.org/10.31652/2521-1307-2025-40-03
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  • Oleksandr Kapranov
Oleksandr Kapranov
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Published 2025-07-07

Keywords

  • climate change discourse, the Ministry of Defence, framing, reports, securitisation, the UK
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Climate change discourse by the British Ministry of Defence: The framing of the 2024 report. (2025). Scientific Notes of Vinnytsia Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi State Pedagogical University. Series: Philology (Linguistics), 40, 33-43. https://doi.org/10.31652/2521-1307-2025-40-03
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Abstract

The current political discourse in the UK is characterised by a notable tendency to securitise the issue of climate change. Given that the British Ministry of Defence (further – the MoD) is responsible for the UK’s security, it is pivotal to shed light onto how the MoD frames the issue of climate change in its reports. Against this background, the present article introduces a study, which employs a qualitative framing analysis in order to examine the framing of climate change in the MoD’s report on climate change published in 2024. The aim of the study is to provide answers the following research question (RQ): How is the issue of climate change framed in the MoD’s 2024 report? In terms of the methodology, the study is based upon a qualitative framing approach to discourse (Entman, 1993). The application of the qualitative methodology to the report yielded the following results, which were manifested by eight different types of frames, namely Agility, Challenge, Costs, Future, Green Energy, Mitigation, Risk, and Technology. It was found that all of the aforementioned frames were discursively situated in the nexus between the issues of security and climate change.  Judging from the findings, the MoD report framed the issue of climate change via the frames that were interrelated or, at least, were indicative of a clear connection between them, which allowed their classification into the following groups: (i) Challenge and Risk, (ii) Costs, Future, and Mitigation, and (iii) Technology and Green Energy. Concurrently, the frame Agility was found to be a stand-alone type of the framing of climate change. Discussion. The frames Challenge and Risk, (ii) Costs and Mitigation, and (iii) Technology and Green Energy were reflective of the literature, which reported the presence of similar frames in the British discourses on climate change. However, it was established that the frames Agility and Future could not be discussed in terms of their relationship to the literature on the grounds that they, and especially, the frame Agility, seemed to be a novel finding not previously mentioned in the prior studies. It could be concluded that the British MoD communicated the issue of climate change in an open access report that was framed in such a way that it seemed to be aligned with the respective frames by the consecutive British governments, such as the frames Challenge and Risk, Costs and Mitigation, and Technology and Green Energy.

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