ECOLOGICAL ERASURE AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE IN 2026 EUROPEAN HEATWAVE HEADLINES: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study investigates how international newspaper headlines present the 2026 European heatwaves and how these representations shape understandings of climate responsibility, vulnerability, and ecological harm. It examines how headlines assign or obscure agency, foreground particular consequences, erase non-human participants, and construct beneficial, ambivalent, or destructive ecological stories. A qualitative research design is adopted. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is utilised as the theoretical framework, while Stibbe’s ecolinguistic framework serves as the approach. The sample comprises 12 purposively selected European heatwave headlines published by The Guardian, Reuters, Al Jazeera, and DW. The headlines are analysed for ideology and representation, lexical choice and agency, silences and foregrounding, and recontextualisation and legitimation before being evaluated through Stibbe’s ecolinguistic concepts. The findings show that most headlines construct ambivalent ecological stories. They communicate the severity of extreme heat, legitimise scientific knowledge, and support emergency planning, cooling provision, public-health protection, and resilient infrastructure. However, they frequently represent heatwave, wildfires, and climate change as autonomous agents while backgrounding governments, fossil-fuel industries, corporations, regulatory failures, and carbon-intensive practices. Adaptation and coping are more prominent than mitigation, accountability, and ecological restoration, while vulnerable communities and non-human life are often generalised or erased. The study contributes to climate communication research by integrating CDA with ecolinguistics and demonstrates that environmental urgency does not necessarily produce ecologically responsible journalism. It recommends clearer attribution of responsibility and greater representation of inequality, ecological interdependence, and non-human consequences.