Sustainability and COVID-19 : UN Definitions and the Coronavirus Corpus

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.