Climate Change Debate Research Articles

Do You See What I See? Emotional Reaction to Visual Content in the Online Debate About Climate Change

ABSTRACT This paper explores the visual echo chamber effect in online climate change communication. We analyze communication by progressive actors and counteractors involved in the public debate about climate change on Facebook, to address the possibility that visual content can bridge ideologically diverse communities. Specifically, we investigate whether visual content depicting protest serves this purpose. The findings reveal a small amount of shared visual content. Interestingly, the emotional reactions to this content for the most part diverge significantly, suggesting that pre-existing attitudes, such as climate ideological position, influence interpretation. Contrary to our expectations, however, we do not observe visual content representing protest activity bridging the two groups. This work posits the possibility of a two-fold (de)polarization around visual content that both connects and divides, which contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the social dynamics that create and sustain the echo chamber effect observed in online climate change debates. KEY POLICY HIGHLIGHTS Even when taking into account visual communication, the online debate around climate change is characterized by the presence of echo chambers with only a small fraction of content that circulates among both climate activists and climate skeptics. In cases where the same visual content circulates within the two groups, the emotional reactions are often opposed, with reactions that are more defined by the pre-existing climate ideological alignment than with an actual engagement with the content.

Paul Sillitoe (ed.) (2021), "The anthroposcene of weather and climate; Ethnographic contributions to the climate change debate"

Paul Sillitoe (ed.) (2021), "The anthroposcene of weather and climate; Ethnographic contributions to the climate change debate"

Factors Influencing Consumer Upcycling Behavior—A Study Based on an Integrated Model of the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Technology Acceptance Model

In the context of the global climate change debate, changing consumer awareness and guiding them towards sustainable lifestyles should be key considerations. This study investigates the factors influencing consumers’ upcycling behaviors by conducting research and collecting 336 valid questionnaires at the “Eco Blet” sustainable design exhibition and workshop held at Livat Beijing (Ingka Centres Beijing). The survey results revealed that consumers’ upcycling behavior is significantly influenced by subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, perceived usefulness, and attitudes. In addition, individuals with higher levels of education and those with annual incomes of less than 100,000 RMB and more than 400,000 RMB are more likely to engage in upcycling. The empirical analysis of consumer upcycling behavior is conducted using structural equation modeling (SEM), and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and technology acceptance model (TAM) are integrated into a comprehensive framework. This research provides both theoretical support and practical insights for promoting sustainable consumer behaviors, contributing significantly to carbon emission reduction.

Climate change debates

Climate change debates

The origin, evolution and impacts of the mining-sceptical movement in Finland

The evolution of the Finnish mining-sceptical movement (MSM) is described and situated within the context of Finnish environmental protest waves (EPWs). This evolution occurred through the uranium debate (UD; since 2005) and mining debate (MD; 2010–ongoing). These stages are described and compared with the characteristics of the Finnish EPWs. The purpose is to determine whether the evolution of the MSM represents a new EPW in Finland.Five EPWs are reported to have occurred in Finland. After the end of the last EPW at the beginning of 2000s, the Finnish environmental movement lost its impetus, followed by a swell/latency. However, the climate change debate returned nuclear energy to the agenda. Together with the rebirth of the Finnish mining industry resulting from activities carried out by foreign companies, uranium exploration restarted in Finland in 2005, which raised opposition. The UD revitalised the environmental movement and opened spaces for local resistance in the countryside. Even though uranium exploration ended in Finland, the UD continued as attention shifted towards other projects associated with uranium. The environmental problems of the Talvivaara mine increased opposition and directed the MD towards projects also focused on other commodities. Because of its duration, impacts, and importance, the evolution of the MSM is suggested to form the sixth Finnish EPW.

Political Regime and Governance on climate Change. Evidence from the Western Balkan Economies

Abstract The political environment plays a crucial role in steering societies to address the challenges posed by global warming and contributing to global initiatives toward a resilient and environmentally sustainable future. Political regimes in different places in the democracy-authoritarianism spectrum show varying degrees of effort to reduce their nation's respective carbon emissions. This paper aims to determine the role of political regimes along with governance dimensions in climate change mitigation. The analysis uses the V-Dem database and the World Governance Indicators (WGI) to conceptualise and measure each country's political system and its institutional quality of governance, respectively. The empirical model uses a panel database of the variables of interest for the years 1998-2022 regarding the Western Balkan (WB) economies. The target group of countries sparks our interest due to their significant challenges, such as widespread pollution, political regime changes, and severe governance problems. Furthermore, integrating the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, which suggests a complex relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability, the analysis provides evidence that the relationship between CO2 emissions and GDP per capita follows a quadratic trend, suggesting that as GDP per capita increases, the associated CO2 emissions may not change linearly but instead follow a parabolic pattern. WB countries also share the ambition of EU accession and hold the EU candidate status. To the extent these states manage to overcome their institutional issues, they will be in the position to implement the EU environmental acquis efficiently, which will amount to a critical step in the region's environmental health. Policymakers and scholars of the field will benefit from this paper since it determines the impact of political systems precisely matched with empirical results to derive conclusive answers regarding the political systems and climate change debate.

A Passion for Virtue? Appeals to Morality and Emotions in European Parliament Climate Change Debates

Although it is well acknowledged that moral foundations have an emotional component, little is known about the relation between moral foundations and emotions in current political and public debates. The analysis of this relation is crucial to better understand causal pathways from affect and emotion to climate change action and behavior. Employing Emotion Discourse Analysis, this study analyzes appeals to moral foundations in European Parliament (EP) plenary debates on the topic of climate change, and their relation to emotions between 1994 and 2022. We show that the relation between moral foundations and emotions depends on the narratives put forward by policymakers from different political groups. After linking narratives, moral foundations and emotions, we hypothesize how the identified combinations affect political action. We show that narratives promoting action-oriented and effective appeals to emotions, which are key in advancing environmental protection, are not the most prominent in EP debates.

Can a rural renaissance be a reality?

This article explores the factors contributing to and consequences of rural depopulation. The important economic and non-economic contribution of the agricultural sector to rural communities is discussed. It is argued that the role of agriculture is often underappreciated and misrepresented in public discourse, in particular in the climate change debate, leading to a ‘recognition gap’ which is damaging to the reputation of the sector, especially among potential new entrants. Farmers need to be positioned to avail themselves of the opportunities presented by the green economy and the transition to a low-carbon food system. This transition will be costly in terms of direct, indirect and opportunity costs, which will be mostly borne by farmers. Policy will need to be targeted to address these costs, support farmers in this transition and position rural communities to prosper in the coming generations.

Noise and opinion dynamics: how ambiguity promotes pro-majority consensus in the presence of confirmation bias.

Opinion dynamics are affected by cognitive biases and noise. While mathematical models have focused extensively on biases, we still know surprisingly little about how noise shapes opinion patterns. Here, we use an agent-based opinion dynamics model to investigate the interplay between confirmation bias-represented as bounded confidence-and different types of noise. After analysing where noise can enter social interaction, we propose a type of noise that has not been discussed so far, ambiguity noise. While previously considered types of noise acted on agents either before, after or independent of social interaction, ambiguity noise acts on communicated messages, assuming that socially transmitted opinions are inherently noisy. We find that noise can induce agreement when confirmation bias is moderate, but different types of noise require quite different conditions for this effect to occur. An application of our model to the climate change debate shows that at just the right mix of confirmation bias and ambiguity noise, opinions tend to converge to high levels of climate change concern. This result is not observed with the other types. Our findings highlight the importance of considering and distinguishing between the various types of noise and the unique role of ambiguity in opinion formation.

Mapping disability and climate change knowledge base in Scopus using bibliometric analysis.

Climate change and disability are rarely addressed by academic scholars within the spectrum of disabilities and as a single field of study. However, the intersectionality of disability exacerbates the vulnerability of people with disabilities to climate change as climate change frameworks in the Global North and South continue excluding them. This study aims to map the research-based knowledge housed in Scopus on disability and climate change. At the same time, it provides insights into innovative (novelty) ways of thinking and proposes a futuristic research agenda. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on Scopus-indexed articles using VOSviewer to map co-occurrences of keywords and co-authorship, and a manual thematic-scoping review augmented the data analysis. The disability and climate change debate as a joint study evolved from concern among health practitioners to human rights and social inclusion. In conclusion, there is a skewness towards mental health and medical sociology lens, while other sub-groups of persons with disabilities are yet to be engaged in co-creating disability-inclusive climate change knowledge. Thematic areas emerged as gaps that future studies embed principles enshrined in the United Nations Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Environmental Politics Through the Use of Social Media to Spread the Issue of Climate Change and Land Fires

Social media is employed in various acts, one of which is related to social movements, as in the example of social movements against climate change that use social media. This study seeks to understand the social media used in the climate change social movement that occurred on social media. This research's value and analysis portion was delivered through a descriptive narrative and a qualitative technique. This study also used qualitative data analysis software (Q-DAS) to learn about the trends in social media conversations and themes. Twitter was the social media platform employed in this study. This study addresses the following question: Q1 What kind of relevant climate change theme is spreading on social media? Q2 Explain the role of hashtags in the climate change debate. Q3 What is the nature of the narrative that has propagated on social media about climate change subjects, and how relevant is it? Q4: How does climate change affect social movements from the standpoint of Green Politics? The findings of this study are as follows: 1.) The climate change topic gained traction on social media. The narrative in this example avoided utilizing hashtags to promote and provide information about climate change talks. 2.) There is still a link between the hashtags for climate change talks on social media. 3.) The narration on the climate change topic is dominating, with hashtags used to ensure that the narration spreads and that netizens pay attention. 4.) The social media climate change movement is a form of green political practice.

Carbon Leakage and International Climate Change Law

AbstractCarbon leakage – the increase of greenhouse gas emissions in foreign jurisdictions following the introduction of domestic or regional climate mitigation measures – raises key questions in the climate change debate. This includes whether carbon leakage constitutes a threat to the environmental integrity of climate policies and, if so, how this could be mitigated. Through the use of four hypothetical models of international climate change regime, this article argues that international climate change law is a key factor in answering this two-part question. Firstly, the article demonstrates that the architecture of international climate change law affects whether carbon leakage can be considered as undermining the mitigation objective of climate policies. Secondly, it draws attention to the interaction – and potential tension – between carbon leakage prevention measures and international climate change law.

The Impact of Climate Change Debate on Agricultural Commodity Markets

Cet article examine l’impact économique du débat autour du changement climatique sur les marchés de produits agricoles. Il montre, en particulier, comment et quand l’attention du public au terme « climate change » (changement climatique) et « global warming » (réchauffement de la planète) influence les prix des futures sur le soja. En nous appuyant sur une analyse de la cohérence par ondelettes, nous identifions les périodes de haute cohérence et analysons la relation entre, d’une part, l’attention du public et, d’autre part, les événements climatiques extrêmes et les variations climatiques. En outre, nous examinons la relation entre l’attention du public et les variations inattendues du prix du soja et analysons l’effet de certains événements qui attirent l’attention. Nos résultats suggèrent que l’attention du public a un effet significatif et transversal sur les prix des futures sur le soja.

The politics of politicization: Climate change debates in Canadian print media.

Politicization is frequently employed as an analytic concept to explain the relationships between politics and media coverage of climate change. However, relatively few works explore how different notions of politicization are mobilized by actors in media discourses themselves. This article does so via a framing analysis of climate change coverage in Canadian newspapers. I investigate how different relationships between science and politics are conceived and associated with varying positions on climate change. In particular, I examine a supposition in science and technology studies that the media remains committed to deficit models and thus uncritically reproduces the authority of science. Scientistic discourses exist but among a diversity of politicization framings. A key finding is that the strongest appeals to scientific neutrality are associated with climate skepticism. This casts light on the nuanced, strategic "politics of politicization" in climate change debates. A more fine-grained and reflexive approach to politicization discourses can help identify productive interventions.

Scalar dissonances, knowledge-making, sense of urgency, and social narratives about the future. Contours of the climate change debate in Latin America

ABSTRACT This article aims to situate climate change by examining three scalar dissonances between “global” and “local” knowledge-making and policy action. The three dissonances – the knowledge production and policy meaning-making nexus, the politics of urgency, and the politics of building socio-climatic future pathways – engage deeply with the emergent literature that deals with climate change from the perspective of Human Geography Studies and the Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS). By posing guiding questions and through examples primarily from Latin American countries, this paper lays out a research agenda that advances geographical sensitivity, allowing us to better understand the “other” geographies of climate science production, circulation, and information use. Furthermore, it highlights the unresolved political and interdisciplinary tensions in accommodating global narratives in regions of the Global South.

Climate change and security debates in the United Nations Security Council between 2007-2021

ABSTRACT This research’s primary motivation is to understand how the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), responsible for maintaining international peace and security, discursively structured climate change-related security issues and institutionalised them in practices by prioritising its five permanent members – China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. Since its resolutions are legally binding, the UNSC is one of the most critical organs of the 193-member UN system. Therefore, it is worthwhile to conduct an in-depth analysis of the Council’s consideration of the security impacts of climate change. Utilising Marteen Hajer’s Argumentative Discourse Analysis, this article contends that France and the United Kingdom effectively shape the discourses on climate change and security within the Council. Nonetheless, it asserts that the Council maintains a narrow focus on climate change, aligned with the political and economic interests of its permanent members, although Russia, China, and even the United States appear to yield substantial influence in actual policymaking.

Social identity bias and communication network clustering interact to shape patterns of opinion dynamics.

Social influence aligns people's opinions, but social identities and related in-group biases interfere with this alignment. For instance, the recent rise of young climate activists (e.g. 'Fridays for Future' or 'Last Generation') has highlighted the importance of generational identities in the climate change debate. It is unclear how social identities affect the emergence of opinion patterns, such as consensus or disagreement, in a society. Here, we present an agent-based model to explore this question. Agents communicate in a network and form opinions through social influence. The agents have fixed social identities which involve homophily in their interaction preferences and in-group bias in their perception of others. We find that the in-group bias has opposing effects depending on the network topology. The bias impedes consensus in highly random networks by promoting the formation of echo chambers within social identity groups. By contrast, the bias facilitates consensus in highly clustered networks by aligning dispersed in-group agents across the network and, thereby, preventing the formation of isolated echo chambers. Our model uncovers the mechanisms underpinning these opposing effects of the in-group bias and highlights the importance of the communication network topology for shaping opinion dynamics.

More than a metaphor: ‘climate colonialism’ in perspective

In early 2022, over 30 years after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its first report on the challenges posed by climate change and four subsequent Assessment Reports later, the word ‘colonialism’ finally entered its official lexicon. The sixth report on ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’ references colonialism, not only as a historical driver of the climate crisis, but also as something that continues to exacerbate the vulnerabilities of communities to it (IPCC, 2022). As Funes (2022) argues, this comes in the wake of long-standing arguments made by Indigenous groups and others on the frontline of climate change about the centrality of colonialism to comprehending and responding to the crisis. The last decade has also seen a significant increase in scholarly literature that draws explicit links between colonialism and climate change – much of which is referenced in the latest IPCC report. While formal acknowledgement of this relationship is long overdue, in this article we argue for caution and precision in the invocation of colonialism within these debates. Following Tuck and Yang’s (2012) classic article setting out why ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’, we argue relatedly that colonialism needs to be understood as more than a metaphor in climate change debates.

Risk‐based thinking for extreme events: What do terrorism and climate change have in common?

AbstractTerrorism and climate change debates are often characterized by worst‐case thinking, cost neglect, probability neglect, and avoidance of the notion of acceptable risk. This is not unexpected when dealing with extreme events. However, it can result in a frightened public, costly policy outcomes, and wasteful expenditures. The paper will describe how risk‐based approaches are well suited to infrastructure decision‐making for extreme events. Risk management concepts will be illustrated with current research of risk‐based assessment of climate adaptation engineering strategies including designing new houses in Australia subject to cyclones and extreme wind events. It will be shown that small improvements to house designs at a one‐off cost of several thousand dollars per house can reduce damage risks by 70%–80% and achieve billions of dollars of net benefit for community resilience—this helps offset some the predicted adverse effects of climate change for a modest cost. The effect of risk perceptions, insurance, and economic incentives is explored for another climate adaption measure. The paper will also highlight that there is much to be optimistic about the future, and in the ability of risk‐based thinking to meet many challenges.

CoDesignS Education for Sustainable Development: A Framework for Embedding Education for Sustainable Development in Curriculum Design

In the context of the global climate change debate, the integration of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in higher education institutions (HEIs) has been identified as one of the top priorities. This paper presents the CoDesignS ESD Framework (hereafter “Framework”) focused on HEIs, though the Framework is applicable to other types of educational institutions. The Framework introduces transformative pedagogies and teaching methods that extend beyond typical ESD competencies, encompassing cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral domains for a holistic design and delivery. It was evaluated using a focus group and interviews among sustainability practitioners and academics, learning and curriculum designers, students, and government officials involved in ESD. The evaluation demonstrates key stakeholders’ engagement with the Framework and appreciation of its potential to integrate sustainability into university curricula across different disciplines. The findings suggest that the Framework is easy to use, making sustainability explicit in the curriculum and actively developing the competencies students require to bring about change beyond the classroom. The feedback received has helped the further development of the Framework, including the CoDesignS ESD Toolkit Planner and Dashboard, which provide a more effective way of integrating the learning design and ESD components embedded as part of the CoDesignS ESD pillars.