Trends in European Climate Change Perception: Where the Effects of Climate Change go unnoticed

Abstract

Climate change threatens global impacts in a variety of domains that must be limited by adaptation and mitigation measures. The successful implementation of such policies can strongly benefit from the general public’s cooperation motivated by their own risk perceptions. Public participation can be promoted by tailoring policies to the populations they affect, which in turn results in the need for a deeper understanding of how different communities interact with the issue of climate change. Social media platforms such as the microblogging service Twitter have opened unprecedented opportunities for research on public perception in recent years, offering a continuous stream of user-generated data. Simultaneously, they represent a crucial discursive space in which members of the public develop and discuss their opinions and concerns about climate change. Subsequently, this thesis gains insight into the characteristics of public reactions to individual climate change effects and processes by investing corresponding corpora of tweets spanning a decade. For seven western European countries, the spatial, temporal, and thematic reaction patterns are determined with a further assessment of the drivers behind each finding. Tweets are collected, classified, georeferenced, and clustered using a selection of Geographic Information Retrieval as well as Natural Language Processing methods before being analysed regarding thematic trends in their content, spatial distributions and influences of environmental factors, as well temporal distributions and impacts of real-world events. The findings illustrate diverse climate change perceptions that vary across spatial, temporal, and thematic dimensions. Communities tend to focus more on issues relevant to their local or national environment, leading populations to develop a certain degree of specialisation for these aspects of climate change. This typically coincides with a substantially more domestic discourse on the subject and a decrease in interest for corresponding international events. In a similar sense, the tangibility of an event drives the magnitude of reactions. However, while more tangible events are more frequently recognised and discussed, less tangible events tend to be more frequently attributed to climate change as the public shifts their focus from immediate impacts on the personal scale to impacts on the global scale. Additionally, traditional news media are shown to retain a high level of control over science communication and the climate change discourse on Twitter, likely influencing the public’s perspective on global warming. Individual real-world events such as major climate conferences and scientific releases only occasionally elicit strong public reactions when they are topically related to an event type, whereas global protests can lead to significant discussion across various event types. Inversely, global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduce public concern about climate change processes