How Does the World View China’s Carbon Policy? A Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Data

Ning Xiang,Chen Zheng,Qiushi Qu,Bo Wang,Limao Wang,Shuai Zhong

doi:10.3390/en14227782

Abstract

China has recently put forth an ambitious plan to achieve carbon peak around 2030 and carbon neutrality around 2060. However, there are quite a few differences regarding the public views about China’s carbon policy between the Chinese people and the people from other countries, especially concerning the doubt of foreign people about the fidelity of China’s carbon policy goals. Based on Twitter data related to China’s carbon policy topics from 2008 to 2020, this study shows the inter- and intra-annual trends in the count of tweets about China’s carbon policy, conducts sentiment analysis, extracts top frequency words from different attitudes, and analyzes the impact of China’s official Twitter accounts on the global view of China’s carbon policy. Our results show: (1) the global attention to China’s carbon policy gradually rises and occasionally rises suddenly due to important carbon events; (2) the proportion of Twitter users with negative sentiment about China’s carbon policy has increased rapidly and has exceeded the proportion of Twitter users with positive sentiment since 2019; (3) people in developing countries hold more positive or neutral attitudes towards China’s carbon policy, while developed countries hold more negative attitudes; (4) China’s official Twitter accounts serve to improve the global views on China’s carbon policy.

Highlights

The increase of greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide has caused the global temperature to rise since the beginning of the industrial revolution
Trend analysis reveals that the count of daily tweets about China’s carbon policy gradually increases, with the notable exception of six sudden rises
The average number of daily tweets about China’s carbon policy is approximately 387 from 2011 to 2021. These results imply that the world has paid an increasing amount of attention to China’s carbon policy from 2008 to 2021, and the level of attention is related to China’s carbon events

Summary

Introduction

The increase of greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide has caused the global temperature to rise since the beginning of the industrial revolution. China is the world’s largest carbon emitter [1], its per capita carbon emissions are less than half of those of developed countries. China is actively leading global climate governances to achieve reductions in carbon emissions [2,3,4]. 75th United Nations General Assembly, China made a commitment to reach carbon peak by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 [5]. Secretary General Guterres warned that the current commitments of all countries are far from enough to curtail the end-of-the-century global temperature rise to within 1.5 ◦ C and further suggested that it may even rise by more than 3 ◦ C.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion