The destructive force of nature and the constructive force of community: Social representations of the 2024 Valencia floods

Extreme weather events, such as floods, are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change and they now affect people in places that had not experienced them before. How do people cope with such events? How do they talk about them? Social scientists and linguists have studied the language, especially metaphors, used in relation to these events for some time. This study contributes to this tradition by comparing the social representations that emerged after devastating floods affected two Western European countries, Spain in 2024 and Germany in 2021. We find almost no change in overall framing of the floods. The Spanish floods, like the floods in Germany, were still framed as malevolent human or animal agents and natural forces leaving behind mud and mayhem. Social representations still portrayed people as helpless in the face of flooding. Alongside these still dominant social representations, a smaller set of metaphors mapped aspects of floods onto people (rather than the other way round), thus highlighting agency rather than the loss of it. This shifts the focus in social representations from the destructive force of nature onto the constructive force of communities. A question for ecolinguists interested in building resilience into linguistic and political responses to extreme floods remains: how can one talk about and prepare for what people in Germany and Spain still call “the unimaginable”?