An ecolinguistic analysis of climate change news in Indonesia: The case of Mongabay

Abstract

Joining a growing body of research in an attempt to further understand climate change discourse, this paper examines the narrative representation of climate change articles on Mongabay Indonesia (Mongabay.co.id), a news site focused on environmental issues. This paper focuses on articles published in Q1 2022 and Q1 2023 to assess how climate agendas emerge in said time periods. Stibbe’s multi-faceted ecolinguistic framework, aligned with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), is used to analyze the corpus. A procedure outlined by Norton and Hulme is adapted to characterize the articles into multiple types of climate change stories: Ecoactivist, Smart Growth Reformer, Ecomodernist, and Lukewarmer. Contrary to Norton and Hulme, the Lukewarmer story is not identified in this paper due to its assertion of climate change being a non-emergency. Analysis of the corpus reveals a prominence of narratives that push for nature conservation, critique the environmental accountability of the government, and support policy and technological advances. This paper provides insights into news narratives and environmental perception in Indonesian societies. However, enhancing the corpus size in subsequent studies would enhance the examination of ecolinguistic expressions in a broader context.