Beyond climate change? Environmental discourse on the planetary boundaries in Twitter networks

Abstract

Social media are increasingly used to obtain and disseminate information about environmental issues. Yet, environmental communication research has focused mainly on social media discussions pertaining to climate change, while overlooking public awareness and discourse regarding the other planetary boundaries (i.e., important and interlinked environmental issues other than climate change). Moreover, while discussions about climate change are often found to be polarising, it remains to be seen if this extends to other environmental issues. We used network analysis and topic modelling to analyse two million environment-related tweets and identified nine ‘green communities’ of users. Climate change was the most popular issue across all communities and other issues like biodiversity loss were discussed infrequently. The discourse was less polarised than previously assumed, was largely pro-environmental, and originated more from the Global North than the Global South. The relevance of our findings for policymakers and researchers in environmental communication is discussed.