Climate change in intergovernmental documents and airlines' annual reports. A preliminary study

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is the United Nations body that aims to implement global standards in civil air transportation. In 2010, the ICAO Assembly issued the first resolution entirely dedicated to climate change and requested that the Council “continue to study policy options to limit or reduce the environmental impact of aircraft engine emissions and to develop concrete proposals [...], encompassing technical solutions and market-based measures” (ICAO A37-19). After that resolution and the second triennial ICAO Environmental report issued in the same year and dedicated to climate change, many aviation operators responded positively to ICAO’s prompts by including in their annual reports more comprehensive sections about environmental impact and specifically CO2 emissions. In contrast, previously, the primary concerns were noise abatement and air quality in airport surroundings. As a part of a broader study, this paper investigates with tools from Critical Discourse Analysis how technical and scientific knowledge is managed across registers by operators of aviation transport. The two ICAO official publications mentioned above constitute the knowledge base that works as a benchmark in this study. Against them, annual reports of six European, American, and Asian airlines have been compared to detect what pieces of knowledge are re/presented in the environmental policy sections of their annual reports and what transformations they have undergone. The process of adapting language and register to the goal, medium, and addressees of the communication is laden with many ethical implications, especially when communicating to financial stakeholders and an audience wider than aviation operators and the scientific community. The set of features used for the discourse analysis has two subsets that overlap in some cases: textual-semantic features include terms of comparison, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, and numerical data format; pragmatic features include presuppositions, inferences, and implicatures.