Do typhoon disasters foster climate change concerns? Evidence from public discussions on social media in China

Abstract

Combating the adverse impacts of extreme climate events through adaptation depends on climate change awareness from both governments and the public. It has long been discussed that historical experiences of climatic hazards might help to foster and raise public concerns about climate change, and consequently contribute to climate actions. However, current studies have reached no consensus on the impacts of the occurrence of extreme climatic hazards on the public’s climate change awareness. This study provides a national-level analysis of climate change-related posts accompanying extreme typhoon events in China from 2011 to 2022, based on social media big data and machine learning, to discern the relationship between occurrences of typhoon disasters and climate change concerns on Weibo—in terms of the volume, contents and sentiment expressed in climate change-related posts. Our analysis found that the volume of climate change-related posts generally did not significantly increase during or after typhoon disasters. In terms of contents, though, the proportion of contents about climate change impacts did significantly increase during typhoon events, from 41.74% to 48.97%, and these disasters also significantly provoked negative sentiment toward climate change, which increased from 62.47% to 70.18%. Contents about climate change impacts and negative sentiment, however, were observed to bounce back to pre-disaster levels within about twelve days after typhoon events. Our study emphasizes the importance of learning from previous climatic disasters, to foster public concerns about climate change and thereby to promote climate actions.