ABSTRACT
The Conference of the Parties (COP), which is the governing body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has for several years strived for an international agreement on the climate change challenge. The Paris Agreement is not legally binding; and for a successful achievement, it is heavily dependent on each country’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. The divergent assessments that are found in existing literature on the issue, demonstrating different perspectives, constitute an interesting point of departure for the analysis that are undertaken in this chapter. It considers the presentation and interpretation of scientific findings in the agreement. The chapter then takes take on a more linguistic perspective in an analysis of the choice of words and their combinations in order to reveal the overall rhetorical tone of the document. The agreement's lexically based linguistic analysis has enabled the confirmation of the hypothesis that the rhetorical tone reflects the necessity of political action to tackle climate change.
