ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the challenges posed by climate change and the contributions that discourse analysis has made towards understanding its scientific, political and cultural dimensions. It provides a brief review of the raison d’être of calls for transformation. The chapter focuses on to the theory and methods of Critical Discourse Studies and outlines the analytical approach to be adopted. It offers a brief exploratory application to some key texts on transformation towards sustainability. Contemporary societies face various crises of sustainability related, inter alia, to consumption, resource use, financial management, employment, and environmental degradation. Climate change is the most threatening and wide-ranging expression of the environmental impact of human activity. In its multiple variants and strands, discourse analysis offers theoretical, conceptual and analytical resources of enormous relevance to social researchf. “Concerns relating to whose knowledge counts, what changes are necessary and desirable, and even what constitutes the end goal of transformation are all intensely political processes.”
