Sustainability and COVID-19
UN Definitions and the Coronavirus Corpus
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2022.i20.1293Keywords:
COVID-19, Coronavirus Corpus, corpus analysis, definitions, sustainable developmentAbstract
This essay pursues the following aims: firstly, UN definitions of sustainability are analysed to see how the concept is framed in international discourse; secondly, the institutional connection between COVID-19 and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is analysed; lastly, the online Coronavirus Corpus is interrogated in order to establish whether online news outlets from twenty English-speaking countries show textual evidence of the institutional connection between COVID-19 and sustainability, and whether the semantics of sustainability in the press correspond to the UN’s. In the analysis, emphasis is laid on the co-occurrence of a set of multi-word expressions, combinations of sustainable, sustainability, and COVID-19.
Correction Notice for Anselmo 2022
In the article “Sustainability and COVID-19: UN Definitions and the Coronavirus Corpus” by Anna Anselmo (Iperstoria, issue 20, Fall/Winter 2022), there was one error in section 1.1.
In particular, the section did not mention definitions of sustainability contained in the United Nations Terminology Database. These have now been added and the following paragraph on page 149 has been integrated into the article:
“The UN further offers definitions in their termbase – www.unterm.un.org[1]. There are four entries for “sustainability” and several others for complex terms containing “sustainability”. Of the single term entries, only two contain definitions. The first definition is taken from the fourth edition of the Dictionary of Ecology: “Economic development that takes full account of the environmental consequences of economic activity and is based on the use of resources that can be replaced or renewed and therefore are not depleted”, and is labelled as “closely linked to the concept of sustainable development”. Another definition is from a glossary annexed to the IPCC 5th assessment report and reads: “A dynamic process that guarantees the persistence of natural and human systems in an equitable manner.””
The bibliographic reference to the UN Terminology Database (www.unerm.un.org) has been added to the References section.
[1] https://unterm.un.org/unterm2/en/. Last visited 26/03/2024.
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