Climate Change Discourse by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds: A Qualitative Framing Analysis

Oleksandr Kapranov

doi:10.69760/portuni.0104022

Autoriai

Oleksandr Kapranov Associate Professor, NLA University College, Oslo, Norway Author https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9056-3311

##semicolon##

https://doi.org/10.69760/portuni.0104022

##semicolon##

Climate change discourse##common.commaListSeparator## framing##common.commaListSeparator## nongovernmental organisations (NGOs)##common.commaListSeparator## qualitative framing analysis##common.commaListSeparator## the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)

Santrauka

Founded in 1889, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has approximately 1.1 million members in 2025, making it one of the largest wildlife conservation organisations in the United Kingdom (the UK) and in Europe (Caddell, 2025). The RSPB’s main goal is to ensure the protection of birds and their environment (Clarke, 2015) by means of conducting awareness campaigns and maintaining nature reserves in the UK. Whilst the RSPB’s activities pertain to the topic of environmental protection, they, concurrently, involve measures that are associated with the issue of climate change. Presently, however, there are no published studies that shed light onto the way the RSPB frames the issue of climate change in its discourse. The present paper aims to enhance our knowledge of the framing of climate change discourse by the RSPB. To that end, the paper presents a qualitative framing analysis of the RSPB’s annual report 2023-2024. The results of the qualitative framing analysis reveal that climate change discourse is framed by the RSPB as eight qualitatively different types of frames. These findings are discussed in relation to the prior studies on the framing of climate change by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs).

##submission.authorBiography##

##submission.authorWithAffiliation##

Kapranov, O. Associate Professor, NLA University College, Oslo, Norway. Email: oleksandr.kapranov@nla.no. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9056-3311

##submission.citations##

Allan, J. I., & Hadden, J. (2017). Exploring the framing power of NGOs in global climate politics. Environmental Politics, 26(4), 600–620.

Anthony, L. (2022). AntConc Version 4.0.11. Tokyo: Waseda University.

Boykoff, M. T. (2011). Who Speaks for the Climate?: Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Caddell, R. (2025). ‘Within and without’: EU nature conservation law and the protection of wetlands. In R. C. Gardner, R. Caddell & E. Okuno (eds.) Wetlands and International Environmental Law (pp. 319–360). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802203028.00022.

Chen, K., Molder, A. L., Duan, Z., Boulianne, S., Eckart, C., Mallari, P., & Yang, D. (2023). How climate movement actors and news media frame climate change and strike: Evidence from analyzing twitter and news media discourse from 2018 to 2021. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 28(2), 384–413. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221106405.

Clarke, R. (2004). Pioneers of Conservation: The Selborne Society and the Royal SPB. London: Selborne Society.

Clarke, R. (2015). Beyond landscape designation: innovative funding, delivery and governance and the UK protected area system. Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal, 26(2), 172–194. https://doi.org/10.1108/MEQ-07-2014-0106.

Della Porta, D., & Parks, L. (2014). Framing Processes in the Climate Movement: From climate change to climate justice 1. In M. Dietz & H. Garrelts (eds.) Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement (pp. 19–30). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203773536.

Dinnie, E., Fischer, A., & Huband, S. (2015). Discursive claims to knowledge: the challenge of delivering public policy objectives through new environmental governance arrangements. Journal of Rural Studies, 37, 1–9.

Dzhengiz, T., Barkemeyer, R., & Napolitano, G. (2021). Emotional framing of NGO press releases: Reformative versus radical NGOs. Business Strategy and the Environment, 30(5), 2468–2488.

Enggaard, T. R., Hedegaard Isfeldt, A. S., Kvist Møller, A. H., Carlsen, H. B., Albris, K., & Blok, A. (2023). Inter-risk framing contests: the politics of issue attention among Scandinavian climate NGOs during the coronavirus pandemic. Sociology, 57(6), 1467–1490. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385221150379

Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58.

Entman, R. M. (2003). Cascading activation: Contesting the White House's frame after 9/11. Political Communication, 20(4), 415–432.

Entman, R. M. (2007). Framing bias: Media in the distribution of power. Journal of Communication, 57(1), 163–173. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00336.x

Entman, R. M. (2010). Media framing biases and political power: Explaining slant in news of Campaign 2008. Journalism, 11(4), 389–408.

IBM. (2011). IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 20.0. New York: IBM.

Fetzer, A. (2014). Conceptualising discourse. In K. P. Schneider & A. Barron (eds.) Pragmatics of Disocurse (pp. 35–64). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Fløttum K. (2018). Linguistic analysis in climate change communication. In M. C. Nisbet, M. S. Schäfer, E. Markowitz, J. Thaker, S. S. Ho, & S. O’Neill (eds.) The Oxford Encyclopedia of Climate Change Communication (pp. 21–38). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fløttum, K., Gjesdal, A. M., Gjerstad, Ø., Koteyko, N., & Salway, A. (2014). Representations of the future in English language blogs on climate change. Global Environmental Change, 29, 213–222.

Harrington, C. (2023). Climate change as a “threat multiplier”: The construction of climate security by the United Kingdom — 2007–2020. In J.N. Hardt, C. Harrington, F. von Lucke, A. Estève, & N. P. Simpson (eds.) Climate Security in the Anthropocene. (pp. 297–318). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26014-8_14.

Kapranov, O. (2015). Conceptual metaphors in Ukrainian prime ministers’ discourse involving renewables. Topics in Linguistics, 16(1), 4–16. https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2015-0007.

Kapranov, O. (2016a). Corpus analysis of discourse markers in corporate reports involving climate change. EPiC Series in Language and Linguistics, 1, 216–227.

Kapranov, O. (2016b). Conceptual metaphors in British Foreign secretary’s Twitter discourse involving Ukraine. Respectus Philologicus, 29(34), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.15388/RESPECTUS.2016.29.34.08.

Kapranov, O. (2016c). The framing of Serbia’s EU accession by the British Foreign Office on Twitter. Tekst i Dyskurs – Text und Diskurs, 9, 67–80.

Kapranov, O. (2017). British Petroleum’s corporate discourse involving climate change before and after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: A cognitive linguistic account. Selected Papers on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 22, 211–223.

Kapranov, O. (2018a). Shell’s image of climate change and its representations in the British financial press. In G. E. Garzone & W. Giordano (eds.) Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise: Where Business Meets Language (pp. 392–409). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Kapranov, O. (2018b). The framing of climate change discourse by Statoil. Topics in Linguistics, 19(1), 54–68. https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2018-0004.

Kapranov, O. (2022). The syntax of climate change: Syntactic means in the construction of Greta Thunberg’s community identity on Facebook. Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Philologia, 67(4), 15–33. https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2022.4.01.

Kapranov, O. (2023). Throwing soup at Van Gogh: The framing of art in climate change activism in British mass media. Discourses on Culture, 19(1), 175–200. https://doi.org/10.2478/doc-2023-0008.

Kapranov, O. (2024a). Between a burden and green technology: Rishi Sunak’s framing of climate change discourse on Facebook and X (Twitter). Information & Media, 99, 85–105. https://doi.org/10.15388/Im.2024.99.5.

Kapranov, O. (2024b). An ecolinguistic approach to the framing of King Charles III’s climate change-related activities by the leading American and British media. Philologia, 22(1), 53–73. https://doi.org/10.18485/philologia.2024.22.22.3.

Lewis-Stempel, J. (2024). England: A Definitive Natural History of England from “Britain’s Finest Living Nature Writer”. New York: Random House.

Laestadius, L. I., Neff, R. A., Barry, C. L., & Frattaroli, S. (2014). “We don’t tell people what to do”: An examination of the factors influencing NGO decisions to campaign for reduced meat consumption in light of climate change. Global Environmental Change, 29, 32–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.08.001.

Nisbet, M. C., & Newman, T. P. (2015). Framing, the media, and environmental communication. In M. C. Nisbet & T. P. Newman (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication (pp. 345–358). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315887586.

RSPB Annual Report 2023-24 (2023). Annual Report. Accessed 20 May 2025 at https://www.rspb.org.uk/about-us/annual-report/annual-report-archive#annual-report-2023-2024

Šimunović, N., Hesser, F., & Stern, T. (2018). Frame analysis of ENGO conceptualization of sustainable forest management: Environmental justice and neoliberalism at the core of sustainability. Sustainability, 10(9), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10093165.

Tjernshaugen, A., & Lee, H. C. (2004). Shaming and Framing: Norwegian Nongovernmental Organizations in the Climate Change Negotiations. Oslo: CICERO Senter for klimaforskning.

Usher, M. (2013). Defending and transcending local identity through environmental discourse. Environmental Politics, 22(5), 811–831. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2013.765685.

Vu, H. T., Blomberg, M., Seo, H., Liu, Y., Shayesteh, F., & Do, H. V. (2021). Social media and environmental activism: Framing climate change on Facebook by global NGOs. Science Communication, 43(1), 91–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547020971644.

Zeng, F., Dai, J., & Javed, J. (2019). Frame alignment and environmental advocacy: the influence of NGO strategies on policy outcomes in China. Environmental Politics, 28(4), 747–770. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2018.1525805.