Climate law is an emerging branch of law, whose semantic technicality is directly linked to the scientific nature of the field concerned. This is due to the fact that climate law, whose birth certificate is the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was born from a mobilization of the international community, mainly by scientists (Goldberg 1993; Allan 2017; Aykut and Dahan 2015). One central concept of climate law is “loss and damage” which refers to the already irreversible damage caused by climate change, which developing countries, especially small island developing states, suffer from (Lavorel 2021), but which so far does not give rise to any compensation or reparation. Understanding how these concepts are defined, not only in a legal and institutional context, but also in the media, could help us to grasp how these legal concepts are represented and how in the light of ever-clearer knowledge on the direct impacts of climate change, these representations evolve. To consider these notions our team relies on a mixed methods approach with a triangulation of investigators, methods (legal, textual terminology and ecolinguistics) and data sets (legal research articles defining loss and damage, institutional report corpus, daily press article corpus).

We begin by presenting the issue of loss and damages as it appears in our legal and institutional corpus by identifying definitions, sub-categories for loss and damages, examples of situations where the concept may be used, main actors referring to the concept and evolution in the framing of the issue between 2013 and 2023. This first stage of our work aims at a better understanding of the legal concept as it appears in a specialized institutional corpus. In a second stage, we question the way in which the press represents this legal concept and how this may affect its understanding by the general public (Biros and Peynaud 2019). By considering definitions, types of loss and damages mentioned, potential victims described and main actors referring to it, we consider how realistic the representation of this legal concept in the press is. Our diachronic corpus enables us to specify whether the press seems to reflect a better understanding of the concept at the end of the time period under consideration or whether the representation remains similar.