Migrants or Refugees?

The Discursive Representation of Climate-induced Migration on BBC News Online

Abstract

The denomination ‘climate’ or ‘environmental refugee’ has been extremely popular in news discourse even though the UN Refugee Convention has not extended the refugee status to people living in deteriorating environmental conditions. As such, the term has been misused and has led to a terminological confusion that strengthens the humanitarian frame through which climate-induced migration is often construed. By adopting a historical-discourse approach, the paper analyses the referential strategies employed in a corpus of 42 articles published between 1999 and 2017 on BBC News Online and demonstrates that, by preferring ‘refugee’ to ‘migrant’, the Corporation frames social actors from a humanitarian perspective that backgrounds migrants and represents climate-induced migration as an economic opportunity.