ClimIta: a Corpus of Media and Institutional Written Communication in Italian on the Climate Crisis

ClimIta is a balanced, 370'000-tokens corpus of written texts in Italian, thematically centred on the topic of the climate crisis, and containing: i) major web pages and environmental campaigns published by Ministries and Departments of the Environment, as well as by major environmental NGOs, in Italy and Switzerland; ii) online newspaper articles from major general and scientific newspapers in Italy and Switzerland; iii) major international, European Union, and national (Italian and Swiss) normative texts on climate change currently in force. The corpus was collected within the two-year research project The Awareness-Raising Discourse about the Climate Crisis. An Analysis of Written Texts in Italian at the Interplay between Rhetoric, Argumentation Theory and Text Linguistics, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, Project no. 230661). The project pursues a twofold aim: (a) a theoretical aim, namely to investigate how frameworks from rhetoric, argumentation theory, and text linguistics interact in shaping persuasive strategies for climate crisis awareness-raising; and (b) a descriptive aim, namely to critically assess existing communication practices that may either encourage or hinder public engagement and action on environmental issues. In line with this focus on public discourse, ClimIta targets texts addressed to the general public by media outlets and political and environmental institutions. The dataset was collected manually and, as already anticipated, is organised into three main subsections. i) The Campaigns subsection consists of texts published over the last ten years on websites and within environmental campaigns by governmental institutions (Ministries and Environmental departments) and non-governmental organisations, at national and regional/cantonal level, in Italy and Switzerland. The subsection mainly includes informative and argumentative texts belonging to different genres, such as campaign webpages, brochures promoting environmentally responsible behaviour, petitions, and official position statements. Texts were identified primarily through the “campaigns” or public awareness sections of institutional and NGO websites and were always included in their entirety. This subsection contains approximately 60,000 tokens and is balanced across governmental and non-governmental actors. Here is a tab summarising the design of the Campaigns subsection. Campaigns Italian campaigns Government Campaigns -Ministero dell’Ambiente e della Sicurezza Energetica (MASE) (7500 tokens) -Agenzia Regionale per la Prevenzione e Protezione Ambientale del Veneto (ARPAV) (7500) 15'000 tokens NGO Campaigns -Legambiente (5000) -Greenpeace Italia -WWF Italia 15'000 tokens Swiss campaigns Government Campaigns -Ufficio federale dell’ambiente (UFAM) (7500) - Divisione dell’ambiente (DA), Dipartimento del territorio, Repubblica e Cantone Ticino (DT) 15'000 tokens NGO Campaigns -ProNatura (5000) -GreenPeace Svizzera -WWF Svizzera 15'000 tokens Roughly 60’000 words -Time span: last 10 years ii) The Newspapers subsection includes online newspaper articles published in the last five years by major Italian and Swiss newspapers in Italian, as well as by well-known science dissemination magazines from both countries. General newspapers were selected based on readership rankings (i.e. the classification for 2024 of Audicom/Audiweb), while science magazines were chosen for their relevance in public science communication. The subsection mainly comprises argumentative texts, with a preference for editorials and opinion pieces on the climate crisis. Articles were retrieved by querying newspaper websites with keywords such as crisi climatica and cambiamenti climatici, and selecting texts that feature figurative language, both creative and conventional. All texts were included in full, for a total of 60 articles amounting to roughly 60,000 tokens. Below you can find summarised the design of the Newspapers subsection: Newspapers Italian newspapers Science magazines National Geographic LeScienze Focus 15 articles Newspapers Corriere della Sera Repubblica IlFattoQuotidiano 15 articles Swiss newspapers in Italian Science magazines Rivista Pro Natura Ticino Tuttogreen Ticinoscienza 15 articles Newspapers Corriere del Ticino LaRegione Tio/20Minuti 15 articles -Total of 60 articles -Roughly 60’000 words -Time span: last 2 years Due to copyright restrictions and paywall access, this subsection is not publicly available on Zenodo but can be accessed for research purposes upon request by contacting the author of the corpus. iii) Finally, the Laws subsection is composed of major international, European Union, and national normative texts on climate change currently in force in Italy and Switzerland. The subsection includes international treaties, EU regulations and directives, Italian laws and legislative decrees, as well as Swiss federal laws and ordinances. It also contains selected excerpts from foundational normative texts, such as constitutions and constitutive treaties, where relevant to environmental protection and climate policy. Most texts entered into force within the last twenty years. Depending on length, texts were included either in full or as selected excerpts, resulting in a balanced subsection of approximately 250,000 tokens across 20 texts. The larger size of the Laws subsection reflects both methodological and theoretical considerations. Normative constitute a crucial discursive source for institutional framings of the climate crisis. A larger textual basis was therefore necessary in order to adequately capture recurring argumentative structures, topoi, and discursive patterns across different legal levels (international, EU, and national). Moreover, given that several legal texts are substantially longer than media or campaign documents, a higher overall token count was required to ensure internal balance within the subsection and comparability across text types. This design choice allows the Laws subsection to function as a robust reference corpus for analyses of institutional and normative climate discourse in Italian. The structure of the Laws subsection can be found below: Laws International treaties 5 texts EU treaties 5 texts National laws (Swiss and Italian) 10 texts (5 Swiss and 5 Italian) -Total of 20 texts -Roughly 250´000 words (12´500 for each text) -Time span: last 20 years ClimIta provides a structured and balanced resource for qualitative and quantitative analyses of climate crisis communication in Italian. By combining media, campaign, and normative texts, including argumentative legal texts that establish key juridical reference frameworks on the climate crisis, the corpus also functions as a reference corpus on the topic and, to the best of current knowledge, represents the only publicly available resource of this kind in Italian. Its design makes it particularly relevant for studies in discourse analysis, rhetoric, argumentation, text linguistics and environmental communication.