Climate Change Discourse of Spanish-Speaking Airlines in Corporate Reports

Abstract

The airline industry is currently responsible for more than 2% of greenhouse gas emissions, making it a major contributor to climate change and global warming. The aim of this paper is to investigate how airlines in Spanish-speaking countries communicate their position on climate change in their corporate reports and whether this has changed over the last few years. To this end, a corpus of 51 corporate reports produced by 5 different airlines between 2003 and 2020 was designed. The reports were subjected to linguistic analysis using computer processing and corpus linguistic methods. The results show large differences between the airlines in the way they communicate their relationship with climate change and suggest the existence of two phases in terms of attention paid to the issue, with a turning point in 2015/2016. In general, climate change tends to be addressed through the reporting of specific data, with limited mention of possible consequences. References to climate change tend to appear in indexes, titles, headings or literal reproductions of reporting standards. This helps to give some prominence to the issue, although there is most frequently no positioning or appraisal of the issue.