Climate Debate Research Articles

Reporting on Young Climate Activism: How Journalistic Multimodal Choices on Television Can Delegitimise Disruptive Dissent

ABSTRACT The effects of climate change and the significant transformations it demands will disproportionally impact young people. Recognising young climate activists as pivotal contributors to the climate debate is essential for fostering inclusive political dialogue. This study employs multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine a 17-minute reportage on young climate activism in Portugal. Our objective is to examine journalists’ role in promoting political agonism by: (1) ensuring the visibility of alternative political visions advocated by young activists, and (2) validating diverse voices and proposals for change, thereby granting them political legitimacy. Through analysing the editorial choices that foster interactions among actors, discourses and modes, such as text, image, and talk, we find that television coverage adopted a critical perspective that worked to differentiate the dutiful activist and the disruptive one. By favouring certain means of social action and by privileging the epistemic authority of certain actors, the examined reportage challenged the political legitimacy of young activists that call for deeper social changes. In doing so, it constrained discussion on alternative pathways for change and transformation, and failed to create—or indeed endorse—a comprehensive and inclusive climate debate.

Between Eco-Anxiety and Solastalgia: Aspirational and Exiled Astronaut Eco-Imaginaries

ABSTRACT Although space travel is not often discussed in relation to the environmental crisis, it is proposed here that how the core agent of space travel, namely the astronaut, is imagined is of cardinal importance to environmental issues. Two astronaut types are identified in the analysis: the aspirational astronaut planning to escape Earth out of a looming sense of eco-anxiety amidst increasing signs of ecological disaster; and the exiled astronaut who experiences overwhelming environmental distress or solastalgia as home becomes stranger every day. The selected images of astronauts are interpreted as eco-imaginaries that embody a particular disposition in terms of their geo-locality and climate changes. The aspirational astronaut is explored by a brief slice into two film depictions, namely Approaching the Unknown (Mark Elijah Rosenburg, 2016) and Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019). The exiled astronaut originates from sub-Saharan Africa through the filmed performance work of the Kinshasha-based duo Michel Ekeba and Eléonore Hellio, working as the Kongo Astronauts (2021–2022), and an eco-film by Maisha Maene, entitled Mulika (2022). It is proposed that the diverging eco-imaginaries are products of where one places Earth in climate debates.

Corporations and climate change: An overview

AbstractCorporations are primary emitters of greenhouse gases yet are also portrayed as key agents in responding to climate change. This overview article explains corporate responses to the climate crisis at three levels of analysis: (i) political (shaping the climate debate and influencing climate policy); (ii) organizational (enacting strategies and practices to address climate change); and (iii) individual (managers and employees caring about and acting on climate change in their personal and professional lives). Our synthesis of the burgeoning literature on corporations and climate change in the fields of management and organization studies, human geography, and political economy highlights how and why particular corporate responses have been enacted, encompassing managerial as well as more critical and radical understandings of business activities.This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives Climate Economics > Economics and Climate Change The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Decarbonizing Energy and/or Reducing Demand Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation

Attitudes in the Flemish Political Climate Debate: A Linguistic Analysis

Attitudes in the Flemish Political Climate Debate: A Linguistic Analysis

Climate knowledge or climate debate?

Abstract While media coverage of climate change has been shown to imply selective knowledge transformation (Carvalho 2007; Brand & Brunnengräber 2012; Kunelius & Roosvall 2021), studies assessing the potential for climate experts’ terminology to acquire ideological undertones as it enters mediatic discourses are still scarce. Through this article, we aim to compare the meaning climate experts and the media give to terms pertaining to climate change in English discourses and to determine whether potential cotextual variation in the discourses produced by these two communities have ideological implications. To this aim, we use the deep learning algorithm Word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013; González Granado 2021) to identify terms whose cotext of occurrence is prone to high variability depending on whether it is included in a newspaper corpus on climate change or one composed of reports from intergovernmental organizations. We then rely on statistical tools from corpus linguistics to compare the main co-occurrences of two of the terms identified – adaptation and energy security –, which we combine with Critical Discourse Analysis (Baker et al. 2008) to interpret the variation in terms of meaning and ideological significance. Results suggest that the appropriation of expert terminology by the media does entail a certain degree of conceptual variation, which notably seems to allow for bringing issues of social justice, financing and energy transition into focus and assessing expert knowledge along those lines.

ЛАНДШАФТ ДЕЗІНФОРМАЦІЇ ЩОДО ЗМІНИ КЛІМАТУ: ДЕНІАЛІСТСЬКИЙ РАКУРС

The author uses the metaphor of a ‘climate change disinformation landscape’ to emphasise the multifaceted nature of the climate change disinformation problem as a complex information system with many interacting variables. This concept encompasses actors spreading disinformation through tradi- tional media and online think tank platforms, politicians and other actors with different attitudes towards the scientific facts about climate change. The analysis of scientific sources allowed the author to find that the public’s trust in scientists is highest; television and online information are seen as the place where respondents see most climate disinformation; political parties and governments are identified as sources of false and misleading disinformation; and the media are seen as influencing the decisions and actions of large corporations on climate change, government policies and public attitudes. The article analyses the actors who reject the scientific consensus on climate change by actively spreading disinformation about global warming. They are known as “climate sceptics” or “climate deniers”. They also include PR firms and other public relations structures that work with climate-damaging corporations, betraying their own idea of corporate social responsibility. Large oil, gas, coal and other companies are the main clients of PR firms, and PR is used to manipulate public opinion, maintain the authority of cor- porations in the climate debate, protect their interests and distract the public from real problems.

Developing a Critical Response to Ad Hominem Attacks Against Climate Science

Ad hominem attacks against climate scientists—including personal attacks questioning an individual’s character, competence, or motives—remain the most common type of contrarian strategy found in contemporary climate debates. Despite their pervasiveness, climate-related ad hominem argumentation remains understudied by scholars in both the humanities and social sciences. This study adapts Douglas Walton’s critical framework for identifying ad hominem attacks against the climate community and evaluating them for rhetorical errors by analyzing developing critical responses. This article offers guidance for future inoculation interventions, including media literacy campaigns that raise awareness and understanding of ad hominem attacks used by contrarian organizations in misinformation campaigns targeting climate science.

Integrated decision-making approach for sectoral low-carbon technology solutions

The contributions of different sectors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are at the heart of the climate debate. In the coming decades, the implementation of low-carbon technology (LCT) solutions in key industries will play a pivotal role in mitigating climate change. This study develops a graphical approach that integrates carbon emissions pinch analysis (CEPA), the best-worst method (BWM), and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to assess LCTs in key industries. CEPA is used to identify LCTs that meet both economic and GHG reduction constraints, then the LCTs selected by CEPA are subjected to CBA, while BWM is applied to assess the weighted performance of LCTs in terms of their environmental, economic, social, and technological aspects. A comparison of the implementation priority sequence of LCTs was made between the dual constraints of carbon and economic considerations and a multi-factor perspective (environmental impact, economic benefits, social impact, and technological aspects). Finally, by incorporating the marginal abatement cost curve (MACC), the optimal low-carbon and economically viable technological pathway can be determined. This study analyzed 85 LCTs from global industries, including the power, food, agriculture, and land use (FAL), industry, transportation, and construction industries. The results for the global scenario from 2020 to 2050 indicate that 38 LCTs have been screened by CEPA to meet the dual constraints of carbon and economic performance, resulting in a GHG emissions reduction of 328.0 Gt CO2-e. Among them, the power industry was the major contributor, with a cumulative reduction of 197.3 Gt CO2-e, followed by the construction industry (97.9 Gt CO2-e), industry (25.4 Gt CO2-e), transportation (4.9 Gt CO2-e), and FAL (2.5 Gt CO2-e); an industry scenario analysis was conducted and listed low-carbon lists in key industries that meet the dual constraints of carbon and economy. This study can contribute to the rational planning and formulation of climate actions at the technological level to effectively enable deep decarbonization.

Orchestrating the climate choir: the boundaries of scientists’ expertise, the relevance of experiential knowledge, and quality assurance in the public climate debate

Scientific knowledge is at the heart of discussions about climate change. However, it has been proposed that the apparent predominance of climate science in the societal debate should be reconsidered and that a more inclusive approach is warranted. Further, the introduction of new communication technology has made the information environment more fragmented, possibly endangering the quality of societal deliberation on climate change concerns. Using focus group methodology, this paper explores how climate scientists, climate journalists, and citizens perceive scientific experts’ mandate when they communicate publicly, the role of experiential knowledge in discussions of climate-related issues, and who the three actors prefer to guard the quality of the climate information exchanged in the public sphere. The findings show that scientific experts are perceived to carry a high degree of legitimacy, but only within their own narrow specialty, while experiential knowledge was seen as more useful in applied domains of science than in arcane research fields. In the new media landscape, journalists are still generally preferred as gatekeepers by all three actor types.

Europe's economic geology generates exploitable critical mineral resources enabling to reduce its geopolitical dependence- Progress beyond state-of-the-art.

Mineral raw materials were for many years the missing link in the climate debate. It is now evident that climate goals can’t be met without them. Mineral-based lithium battery and neodymium magnets value chains are not in balance between upstream-downstream efforts e.g. electric vehicles boom when energy transition mineral resources are yet not secured, Considering the long period of time (from exploration to mining takes about 15 years) needed for the mineral value chains to be fully operational, the technologies addressing the implementation plan of climate change goals might not always readily available due to lack of the mineral resources needed. However, Europe’s opportunity to become self-sufficient in mineral raw materials supply from own sources and resources, is strongly favored by its geological setting and metallogenetic evolution. Critical and strategic mineral raw materials from European primary and secondary resources produced in Europe can be taken as a guarantee for high standards in social, environmental, and economic terms. Elements and practices related to circular economy, responsible sourcing and resource efficiency addressed by the new EU industrial strategy, should be particularly considered. Major European mineral belts, such as Fennoscandian, Iberian, Carpathian-Balkan, host highly potential exploration targets challenging the likelihood for discovery of new resources and feasible mining prospects. At this stage recycling is not significant resource provider for some of the critical and strategic mineral raw materials. For the EU and the rest of the world to develop mineral supply chains, less dependent on China, strengthening key technology value chains, including processing, refining and metallurgy facilities, seems to be a dominant target.

Integrating Life Cycle Assessment in Conceptual Aircraft Design: A Comparative Tool Analysis

Early and rapid environmental assessment of newly developed aircraft concepts is eminent in today’s climate debate. This can shorten the decision-making process and thus accelerate the entry into service of climate-friendly technologies. A holistic approach within the conceptual aircraft design is taken into consideration in terms of a life cycle assessment (LCA) to properly model and evaluate these concepts. To provide an understanding of how different LCA software affects the assessment, the goals of this study are to establish a baseline metrics definition for comparative evaluation and apply them to two tools. The first tool is an existing simplified derivative of openLCA, while the second, developed in this study, is an automated interface to the same software. The main finding is that researchers and practitioners must carefully consider the intended use of the tool. The simplified tool is suitable for training and teaching purposes and assessments on single score level. In contrast, an advanced tool is required in order to appropriately analyze the overall impact categories requiring high levels of LCA expertise, modeling, and time effort.

Strengthening the Quest for Sustainable Development Through Persuasive Climate Argumentation

This study explored the nexus between framing, persuasion and the quest for sustainable development in a competitive policy debate setting using content analysis approach. Evidence from the analysis reveals several insights about the underlying mechanism that governs persuasive climate argumentation which shapes sustainable development trajectory. First, the study showed that arguers construct arguments that appeals to logos as a major persuasion strategy. Second, it demonstrated how persuasion strategy entrench a culture of persuasion in climate debates. Third, it found a discordant relationship between fallacies and persuasion strategy in climate argumentation, which jeopardises arguments' persuasive power. Finally, the study evaluated how tensions in the mainstream socio-economic and environmental ecosystem creeps into climate arguments and limit persuasive power of climate arguments. These are regarded as reflective pattern of climate argumentation that are capable of stimulating behavioural change and communication strategies for sustainable development.

The Road to Cop27: Making Africa's Case in the Global Climate Debate

The Road to Cop27: Making Africa's Case in the Global Climate Debate

“I talk to producers like I’m a producer!” Exploring extension professionals’ perceptions and framing of climate change

Climate change is a central risk to global agriculture. As extension professionals are key disseminators of information on agricultural production, their perceptions of climate change and how they convey climate information to farmers is important to understand. This study explored how extension professionals in Missouri perceive the issue of climate change, how they frame communications with their producer stakeholders, and their need for training. We conducted an online survey with 112 extension professionals in the state, using Maibach and colleagues’ Six Americas Scale. The majority of participants believed that climate change is happening, although participants fell into each segment of the scale. There was a significant relationship between conservative ideological leaning and disbelief in climate change. Participants were more likely to use terms like “extreme weather,” “weather variability,” and “long-term weather” and least likely to say things like “climate debate,” “global warming,” and “greenhouse gases.” Only 6.7% of participants had received any formal training on climate change. These findings point to the need for participatory training for extension professionals on climate change, to build climate literacy while also teaching climate scientists best practices for communicating these issues to the public. .

Building the Concept of Just Transition in Law: Reflections on its Conceptual Framing, Structure and Content

This article focuses on the concept of just transition, which has recently greatly expanded in the climate debate, expressing the demand to adopt and implement climate policies leading to decarbonisation in a way that maintains equity and justice. Building on previous research on the concept of just transition in other disciplines of social sciences, and on the concept’s appearance in international climate law instruments and law literature, we analyse the just transition in the field of law. We seek to clarify its conceptual framing, to define its meaning, and to determine its position and limits in law. We then examine it vertically (for each level of law) and horizontally, addressing the main criteria that define its content, i.e., human rights and legal principles.

A framework for making citizen science inclusive with storytelling methods

Citizen science is challenged by a participation inequality that is not compatible with a democratic approach to science. To include the voices of underrepresented groups, this article presents “STORCIT”, a framework for making citizen science inclusive with storytelling methods. This framework was trialed in the project “Climate Stories” with two small-scale pilot studies in Hasselt and Brussels (Belgium). This project involved around 50 young people with a diverse background, since they are often overlooked as agents of change in the climate debate. During the project, they recorded their experiences related to the changing climate through citizen science and storytelling methods. The STORCIT-framework was designed through five consecutive phases: i) setting the scene, ii) generating knowledge and learning, iii) sharing personal narratives iv) developing stories, and v) exhibiting to the public. The results reflect on the implementation of this approach, together with the experienced challenges, limitations, and gains. Overall, the approach is highly participatory, multi-faceted and supports the democratization of knowledge generation. The gathered knowledge helps participants to reflect on their story, raise their voice and catalyze actions for social change. In the context of citizen science research, practitioners are encouraged to explore and further adapt this framework to other (justice) domains and involve other vulnerable target groups. In particular, it can be deployed by those who aim to include diverse audiences and stimulate inclusive dialogue between science, society and policy with actions for social change.

Developing an Ad Hominem typology for classifying climate misinformation

ABSTRACT Misinformation produced by various interest groups is a significant contributing factor to public confusion about climate policy. Character assassination against climate scientists and policymakers is the most common type of misinformation strategy used by contrarians in climate debates (Coan, T. G., Boussalis, C., Cook, J., & Nanko, M. O. (2021). Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 22320). Despite its widespread use, however, character assassination remains understudied by social scientists, especially in the context of climate change. This study adapts Douglas Walton’s (1998. Ad hominem arguments. University of Alabama Press) typology of ‘ad hominem’ attacks – personal attacks targeting an individual’s character, competence, or motives – to misinformation campaigns against the climate community. We developed an original codebook for classifying ad hominem arguments made by climate contrarians. Drawing on a 553-paragraph sample from a corpus from 55 contrarian blogs and 15 conservative think-tank websites published in English between 2008 and 2020, we then determined the relative prominence of each type of attack using a consensus-coding approach. Bias attacks, which entail accusing climate scientists of political partisanship or having an ideological agenda, were the most common form of contrarian ad hominem attack. The dominance of bias attacks can be explained by their strong relevance for scientific credibility. The study found that ad hominem attacks, often with bias and moral attacks clustered together, are the most common combination. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for climate policy and future research. Key Policy Insights Climate misinformation politicizes climate science, further amplifying ideological conflict and fostering ideological polarization; Climate misinformation campaigns feature a range of different types of ad hominem attacks designed to undermine the credibility of climate scientists; The most common type of ad hominem attack on climate scientists in our sample was bias attacks, which entail accusing climate scientists of political partisanship or of having an ideological agenda; Attacks on the moral character of climate scientists were the only type of ad hominem that increased during the period under study (2008–2020); Different types of ad hominems often appeared together, with the most common combination being bias and moral attacks; Ad hominem attacks on climate scientists are part of misinformation campaigns designed to stall discussion on climate change and delay the implementation of climate policies.

Moral power of youth activists – Transforming international climate Politics?

Youth Climate Activists are important norm entrepreneurs as humanity is increasingly awakening to the realities of accelerating climate change. They push for seeing climate change not merely through cost-benefit analysis frames but through frames of multiple climate justices. But how successful have these activists been in shifting perspectives in the context of international climate politics? This paper aims to investigate (1) to what extent the normative framework advanced by this movement is increasingly penetrating the international public climate debate, changing arguments, priorities, and frames around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and (2) the key actors pushing for normative change. Using a unique and comprehensive Twitter dataset for the period between 2014 and 2021 revolving around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and major youth climate protest events we combine various computational methods, including transformers-based topic modelling and social network analysis in this study. We find that indeed the normative framework advanced by the movement has successfully penetrated the discourse around UNFCCC and that youth climate activists were able gain support from central actors outside the movement, which is further contributing to the diffusion of their normative framework. We conclude that while these results demonstrate the moral power of youth climate activists, more research is needed to understand the influence on the actual negotiations outcomes

Italian sentiment analysis on climate change: Emerging patterns from 2016 to today

The debate on climate change has increasingly attracted attention, especially among young people, since the foundation of the movement Friday for Future and the raising fame of Greta Thunberg. Social media websites can be used as a data source for mining public opinion on a variety of subjects including climate change. Twitter, in particular, allows for the evaluation of public opinion across time. Although it is a known problem that Twitter population is biased with respect to the whole population, it is also true that Twitter users are more likely to be young people. For this reason, the sentiment analysis of Twitter textual data on climate topics provides valuable insights into the climate discussion and could be considered as representative of the rising climate movement. In this study, a large dataset of Italian tweets between 2016 and 2022 containing a set of keywords related to climate change (e.g. Global warming, sustainable development, etc.) is analysed using volume analysis and text mining techniques such as topic modelling and sentiment analysis. Topic modelling, performed using word embedding, allows validating the keywords’ set and providing the prevalent discussion in Italy about the climate agenda and the major concerns related to climate emergency. Both daily volume and sentiment of tweets series have been analysed. The first series allows assessing the Italian participation to the climate debate, while the latter provides useful insights on the overall evolving mood during these years. In particular, we show that the major Italian concerns are related with global warming with a negative mood while a positive mood is recorded when public policies on environment are implemented.

A “lifeline out of the COVID‐19 crisis”? An ecofeminist critique of the European Green Deal

A “lifeline out of the <scp>COVID</scp>‐19 crisis”? An ecofeminist critique of the European Green Deal