Climate Change and Its Lexicon: An Analytical and Critical View

Abstract

Climate change is an overwhelming issue today, but sociology has yet to fully engage with its hermeneutical and political aspects. The article tackles this limitation and thus the lexicon of climate change, proposing an integrated framework that brings its principal concepts and notions together. In particular, it singles out hazard, risk and threat, vulnerability and resilience, adaptation, mitigation and precaution, Anthropocene and Capitalocene, nature and society. Although some authors have stressed the political aspects underlying these concepts and notions, and the IPCC itself has incipiently recognised this issue, the parameters of the debate remain conspicuously narrow. The article therefore proposes to engage it in direct and strong political terms, countering the partly successful operation of depoliticisation that such concepts and notions undergo. While the article concentrates on discursive aspects, it eventually points to the role of agents and power within the UN system concerning the articulation of this lexicon.