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In:Crises We Live By: A transdisciplinary study of crisis and its metaphors in their cultural context
Edited by Irene Leonardis
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 20] 2026
► pp. 127–149

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“The house is on fire”

Eco-anxiety and dystopian metaphors during the Cop26

 | University of Bologna
Published online: 5 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.20.06gag
Abstract
The climate debate tends to be polarised between hope for solutions (ecological utopia) and a lack of future perspectives (eco-anxiety, ecological dystopia). This contribution provides a linguistic, discursive, and figurative representation of the climate crisis by means of psychological and religious metaphors in French and Quebecois press discourse during the Cop26 political negotiations. Drawing on CMT and CMA, the corpus-driven analysis considers the mental lexicon shared by the francophone community through instances of subjectivation of the environmental issue linked to the climate ticking clock and its dystopian configuration. The eco-anxiety lexicon and multimodal representations appear to convey different sinister scenarios, shaping the symbolic dimensions of the crisis we live by via established but also emerging metaphors.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction to Cop26: Corpus collection and methodological frame
  • 2.Climate crisis metaphors within the prism of press discourse
    • 2.1War and/as disease metaphors: Climate crisis is the enemy
    • 2.2The energy metaphor: Shaping a carbon free future
  • 3.Apocalypse now? Framing eco-anxiety through dystopian and religious metaphors
    • 3.1Climate crisis is a ticking doomsday clock: The time bomb metaphor
    • 3.2The last supper multimodal metaphor
    • 3.3Climate crisis is a downhill path/Journey to hell
    • 3.4Metaphors from the end of the world and narrative frames
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (28)
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