Communicating urgency to prevent environmental damage: insights from a linguistic analysis of the WWF24 multilingual corpus (2025)

Abstract: Contemporary environmental discourse focuses on effectively communicating ecological vulnerability to raise public awareness and encourage positive actions. Hence there is a need for studies to support accurate and adequate discourse production, both by humans and computers. Two main challenges need to be tackled. On the one hand, the language used to communicate about environment issues can be very complex for human and automatic analysis, there being few resources to train and test NLP tools. On the other hand, in the current international scenario, most texts are written in multiple languages or translated from a major to minor language, resulting in different meanings in different languages and cultural contexts. This paper presents a novel parallel corpus comprising the text of World Wide Fund (WWF) 2024 Annual Report in English and its translations into Italian and Brazilian Portuguese, and analyses their linguistic features.

## introduction environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss, global climate and sustainability, have an important social relevance today and are increasingly debated in all countries, in a variety of communication channels and media. nevertheless, notwithstanding the great amount of dissemination and communication about environmental matters, the recent literature has problematized the effectiveness of such discourse due to the complexity in the content of this kind of texts. for instance, italian dissemination texts discussing issues related to the environment, published by the european agency and journals, have been evaluated as posing readability challenges for people who do not have at least a high school degree @xcite . moreover, in the current international scenario in which disseminating clear and homogeneous messages about the environmental crisis is crucial, texts are often written in multiple languages or translated from a major (in most of cases english) to minor languages, resulting in the construal of different meanings in different countries. governmental entities have also detected this kind of difficulty and are trying to address it. for example, in 2020 the european commission published a study showing that more than half of the environmental claims examined in the european countries were vague, misleading or unfounded, while 40% were completely unfounded. to promote more accurate and timely information, in march 2023, the european parliament published the green claims directive foot_0 . in countries especially involved in the environmental crisis, such as brazil, a large variety of educational and informative initiatives are promoted to foster the correct dissemination of information (see, among other, climate change and public perception in brazil foot_1 , a project for measuring knowledge and concern of brazilians on climate change and the yearly forest fires in the country. the studies and political interventions above reported clearly point to the importance of language in raising public awareness to save the planet. in addition to the life sciences, disciplines such as computational linguistics are also expected to address the challenges posed by environmental discourse from the perspective of their theoretical and methodological approaches and applying different strategies that can impact on discourse and, ultimately, on societal moves towards sustainability. by providing a fine-grained analysis of the language used to communicate environmental issues, computational linguistics can indeed collaborate with crucial information on how individuals, groups of people or entire societies are coping with environmental issues, their attitudes, awareness and willingness to work towards more sustainable life patterns for the planet. nonetheless, machines also are facing challenges to analyse texts on environmental discourse, first of all because they use a specialized lexicon even when written with a popularization intent. this motivates the development of pretrained models @xcite dedicated to address texts about environmental issues which include specific expressions that general language lms can not represent accurately @xcite and different languages. but there are other challenges when dealing with environmental texts. for example, the frequent inclusion of infographics, images and tables that integrate the text content can make automatic analysis particularly difficult @xcite . a further and also more serious challenge is the scarcity of available datasets and corpora to train tools for automatic analysis and evaluate their performance on texts about environmental issues. for example, as reported in @xcite , resources for sentiment analysis of environmental texts are currently very poor for all languages. some corpora about environmental topics are available for english and very few for other languages. in general, it is striking that the development of tools and resources to tackle the problem, including by computational linguistics, has not yet involved languages spoken in countries which have long been among key stakeholders in environmental phenomena, as is brazil, for example. on top of that, only topics related to climate change seem to have attracted most of the research community interest (probably due to the higher visibility and quantifiability of its effects), while others are less studied in the context of computational linguistics. this is the case of biodiversity loss, one of the most debated environmental topics at present. in this paper, we introduce a novel multilingual parallel corpus wwf24 comprising texts about biodiversity loss and other environmental issues published within a report in 2024 by the world wildlife fund (wwf) foot_2 , and we provide the results of the language analysis we applied to it. in line with the literature, the results reveal differences in the way meanings are construed in each language. they may have significant impact on the ultimate effectiveness in the way meanings are construed to communicate ecological vulnerability and raise public awareness and encourage positive actions accordingly. we have included three languages in the preliminary release of our corpus, namely english, brazilian portuguese and italian, also taking into account issues related to translation and different renditions for the key concepts. the research questions we want to investigate are therefore as follows: our main contribution includes the preliminary release of a novel multilingual parallel corpus wwf24 of environmental discourse foot_3 and the reporting of results of a set of analyses. our main goal is to provide data that support the development of lms especially dedicated to the topics related to biodiversity. drawing on the premise that our language construes our experience of the world @xcite examining the language used in environmental discourse allows us, not only to gather insights into how different languages construe different meanings, but also to better characterize the complexity of environmental discourse. the paper is organized as follows. the next section briefly surveys related work. section 3 introduces the wwf24 corpus providing the details about the texts compiled. section 4 and 5 are devoted to describing the analysis performed on the corpus and the results obtained. in section 6 we provide a discussion of the results of our analysis, conclusions and envisioned steps for further work. in the last year, the application of nlp to environmental issues has been more reported on in scientific events and, in particular, in workshops such as climatenlp 2024 foot_4 or iclr 2024 -tackling climate change with machine learning foot_5 . both events will be held again in 2025. the development of language models dedicated to climate change topics, such as climatebert @xcite and the above mentioned events underline how climate change is currently raising a specific attention within computational linguistics. as far as corpora to be used in nlp experiments, a corpus for italian has been recently published and is described in @xcite , while efforts made for building a multilingual corpus including italian, indonesian and english are described in @xcite . among the most recent corpora for english we can cite @xcite , which is focused on issues related to climate change observed from a diachronic perspective. one of the aims of our contribution is expanding the variety of environment-related topics and number of languages, in this particular paper including brazilian portuguese, which is currently under represented. ## data this section describes the corpus we collected for the purpose of analysing linguistic features of environmental discourse. to compile our corpus wwf24, we downloaded the original version of wwf's 2024 living planet report, available in english at https:// livingplanet.panda.org/en-us/ . the brazilian version was downloaded from https: //livingplanet.panda.org/pt-br/ and the italian version from https://www.ww f.it/cosa-facciamo/pubblicazion i/living-planet-report/. henceforth the three versions will be referred as wwf24-eng, wwf24-ita and wwf24-bra. they can be considered as a starting point for a resource in which more languages will be included and the same methodology applied. a comparison of the three versions of wwf's 2024 living planet report showed that they all featured the same images and text content. in both the italian and brazilian versions, the names of the translators are acknowledged. however, unlike the brazilian version, in which all infographics are translated, most infographics in the italian version are partially translated or not translated at all. for the purposes of language analysis, images and infographics were removed and plain text files were created as part of the novel corpus wwf24. as wwf's 2024 living planet report is a technical report, drawing on data and domain termi-nology used by wwf in accordance to other major stakeholders and at the same time aiming at a wider readership, we expected the use of technical terms as well as lay explanations, which knowledgeably poses a challenge in translations. an example of one such challenge is the terminology inwwf's 2024 living planet report, for instance "tipping point" and "nature-positive" (see section 4), which are used as technical terms in the environmental domain and which need to be clarified to a lay audience. our analysis thus began by exploring general characteristics of the texts and finally focused on specific terms. to query the corpus we relied on text analysis software: sketch engine foot_6 and voyant tools foot_7 . for a fine-grained analysis of two particular terms -'tipping point' and 'nature-positive'we performed manual alignment of the sentences in which the terms occurred. the corpus compiled is deemed a valuable contribution for an area in which there are only very few datasets. moreover, the first release of our corpus compiles data for italian, brazilian portuguese and english, but and expansion is scheduled to include in wwf24 texts from other language families, as is the case of turkish. some considerations related to the debate about the environment and languages in general motivated our initial choice of three languages. english is the language in which the wwf's reports are originally written, assumed as a medium of communication and the most spoken language around the world. portuguese (including european and brazilian portuguese) is among the 8 most spoken languages with 264 million speakers, and most of them being in brazil foot_8 . brazil is one of the countries most impacted by environmental phenomena and one of the main stakeholders in environmental discussions with the greatest biodiversity of flora and fauna on the planet. nevertheless, based on our knowledge, we are not aware of corpora available for this language about the discussion of biodiversity loss. finally, italian has been selected because of our expertise and because it underlines a culture that is enough different from those represented by the other two languages. linguistic analysis is expected to pave the way for the development of annotation schemes that can be later applied on the data for building, not only lms, but also benchmarks that are crucial for the evaluation of results provided by lms. ## linguistic analysis we performed different techniques aimed at extracting the most important lexical and semantic features in a cross language perspective. we computed the number of sentences, words and lemmas in the wwf24-eng corpus using the text analysis software sketch engine. as can be seen in these 6 nouns were selected in order to examine their co-occurrence with verbs. it should be noted that the results of the following analyses (created with the word sketch function of sketch engine) are not identical for all three languages. morpho-syntactic annotation tools are available for italian and english, allowing sketch engine to build on its results to obtain accurate information about word behaviour, whereas they are not available for brazilian portuguese. this means, for example, that for a noun n, sketch engine can distinguish between verbs where n occurs as a subject and those where n occurs as an object complement, whereas for brazilian portuguese it can only recognise verbs with which n co-occurs. in the upper part of the figure 1 we can see some important differences for the noun 'nature'/'natura'/'natureza', i.e. those that occur most frequently in all three languages: in italian, the most frequently used verbs with 'natura' as object are 'ripristinare' (to restore) and 'proteggere' (to protect); they also occur in the other languages, but the link between the words 'nature' and 'natureza' and these verbs is less strong in the data for english and brazilian. in the lower part of the figure 1 , the diagrams for the nouns 'biodiversity'/'biodiversità'/'biodiversidade' are shown. we can see that in all languages the concept of biodiversity is linked to the action of preserving ('conserve', 'conservare' and 'conservar'). however, the fact that in italian biodiversity is in almost all cases the object of active verb forms underlines that the responsibility for its conservation is perceived as the task of a specific person or entity (subject of these verbs). for the other 4 most frequent word groups mentioned above, the analysis is given in the diagrams in the appendix-a. we can also observe that different attitudes towards environmental issues emerge from the data if we focus on the types of verbs used in their discourses. if we read the lists of verbs used in the three subcorpora of wwf24, we can see a significant difference in the use of modal verbs and thus an underlying expression of a different intention to describe actions as possible and their resolution as obligatory. modal verbs are used more frequently in the italian subcorpus than in the other two ones. in wwf24-ita, among 558 different verbs, the modal verb 'potere' (can) is the second most frequently used (169 occurrences) and 'dovere' (must) the fourth most frequently used (115 occurrences). in wwf24-bra, over 577 different verbs, 'poder' is the second most used verb (169 occurrences) and 'dever' the ninth (52 occurrences). in wwf24-eng, modal verbs occur less than ten times in 557 different verbs. the detection of keywords foot_9 from the three subcorpora also shows that there are important differences among them and that the focus of the discourse is not exactly the same in the three versions of the wwf's report. we started from the list of the ten more characteristic keywords extracted from wwf24-eng, i.e. 'wwf', 'lip', 'nature-positive', 'nature-based', 'overexploitation', 'ipbes', biodiversity', 'gbf', 'oecm', 'deforestation'. then we observed whether the corresponding keywords occur also in the lists for italian and brazilian portuguese respectively drawn from wwf24-ita and wwf24-bra. only six of the ten keywords occur in the three subcorpora, but only four with comparable weight (rank in the list). it must be noted that among these four, three are acronyms which are not translatable expressions, i.e. 'lpi' (living planet index), 'ipbes' (intergovernmental corpus with respect to a very large reference corpus for the same language. the reference corpora used in our analysis of keywords are: ententen21 for english, ittenten20 for italian and pttenten23 for portuguese. science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services) and 'gdf' (global diversity framework), while the remaining one is 'biodiversity'/'biodiversidade'/'biodiversità'. the keywords related to 'overexploitation' ('superexplorac ¸ão' and 'sovrasfruttamento') are similarly ranked in the three subcorpora. it is particularly striking that 'deforestation', the keyword ranking as tenth in the list from wwf24-eng and as sixth in the list from wwf24-ita, does not appear in the list from wwf24-bra. with regard to technical terms, some of which are likely candidates to multi-word expressions 11 , two in particular were explored in our analysis. the first one is 'tipping point', a term which is pivotal in the report and which is amply used and defined in several websites 12 . the original 'tipping point' has 74 occurrences in the wwf24-eng. the italian version introduces the term in quotes and provides a translation: "'tipping point' o punto critico di non ritorno" (lit.: critical point of no return). subsequently, it alternates between the term in english (41 occurrences) and its italian translation (13 occurrences). unlike the italian text, the brazilian version uses only 'ponto de não retorno' (73 occurrences). the term 'tipping point' is actually a concept developed originally from a physics perspective, which later came to be adopted in other domains and introduced to the lay public through science journalism. 13 a quick query in online publications shows that academic publications in italian and portuguese use the english term. the second term is 'nature-positive', technically defined in some websites 14 and which poses a challenge to translations into italian and brazilian portuguese as in english is used mostly attributively in pre-modifying position, i.e. as an attribute to a noun, requiring renditions by qualifiers in post-modifying position. there are 20 occurrences of 'nature-positive' in the wwf24-eng, collocating with 'production'(7), 'food systems'(4), 'practices' (3), 'businesses and enterprises' (2), 'future' (2), 'food production' (1), and 'energy transformation' (1). the wwf24-ita uses different renditions to translate 'nature-positive', namely, qualifiers such as 'rispettose della natura' (lit.: respectful of nature), 'positivo per la natura' ((lit.: positive for nature), 'nature-positive' as a borrowed term operating as a qualifying adjective 'pratiche nature-positive' (lit.: practice nature-positive); and a few adjectival clauses such as 'che rispettano la natura' (lit.: which respect nature). finally, the wwf24-bra uses 'nature-positive' as a noun in prepositional phrases qualifying another noun, e.g., 'produc ¸ão de natureza-positiva' (lit.: production of nature-positive); 'focado em natureza-positiva' (lit.: focused on naturepositive); and qualifiers such as 'positivo para a natureza' (lit.: positive for nature). in environmental organizations webpages in italian (cf. https://www.reteclima.it /nature-positive-un-mondo-equo-a -zero-emissioni-e-a-favore-della -natura/), the concept of "nature-positive" is presented as a term borrowed from english and is 13 cf. @xcite 14 https://blog.3bee.com/guida-al-conce tto-di-nature-positive/ used in english. so is the case in publications by wwf italy (cf. https://www.wwf.it/cos a-facciamo/pubblicazioni/biodiver sita-fragile-maneggiare-con-cur a/). in publications by wwf brazil, the concept is used in portuguese as "natureza positiva" (lit.: nature positive). ## discussion, conclusions and future work this paper presents the first release of the novel multilingual corpus wwf24. it compiles texts published in 2024 by the wwf for reporting on the evolution of environmental crisis all around the world and focuses on three languages, i.e. english, brazilian and italian. both the data and analyses provided in this paper are under several respects preliminary, but useful for drawing the methodology we will apply in the future development of the resource. our preliminary analysis points to some interesting avenues for studying diversity in approaches to environmental issues, in particular how meanings are construed in different languages regarding basic notions in the debate about the environment, such as biodiversity and nature. the expression of different intents and attitudes towards the crisis emerge instead from the different verbs used in the three subcorpora we observed. by contrast, the use of technical terms highlights that the language used in the wwf reports is featured by a certain degree of complexity and may be challenging for a significant part of the readers, as terms used to refer to technical concepts, such as 'tipping point' and 'nature-positive' have varied renditions in italian and portuguese, which runs counter the univocality of technical terms. however, the choice of varied renditions may be accounted for by the characteristics of the wwf report referred to in our introduction, namely, the need to present technical information to a lay audience. our observations may be seen as the starting point for future work since they help us in formulating hypotheses to be validated (or refuted) following several possible directions. first of all, the availability of the wwf's reports for several other languages will allows us to expand our corpus by including more languages and comparing a larger set of different cultures. as mentioned above, like most documents for the dissemination and public discussion of environmental issues, the reports published by the wwf also include pictures and infographics that integrate the textual content. by extending the analysis to multimodal information we will be able to collect more insights into the debate about the environmental crisis. finally, other forms of analysis, such as sentiment analysis and topic modelling (which we applied only on english data but will be applied on the other languages when more resources will be available for them also), but also frame extraction, can be helpful for collecting the different facets of the ongoing debate and how it varies across different cultures and countries.