Analysis and Opinion on the Climate and Sustainability Debate, edited @Chair of Climate Communication, University of Hamburg
Reviews, overviews, thoughts and updates of contemporary academic research on climate and sustainability communication.
von Fenja De Silva-Schmidt
Auf der European Communication Conference in Prag haben wir erste Ergebnisse aus der Tagebuchstudie des Projekts “Down to Earth” präsentiert. Für den Vortrag wurden die Angaben zu den Gesprächen der 41 Teilnehmer über den Klimawandel analysiert, die sie im Zeitraum der Klimakonferenz in Paris 2015 geführt hatten.
Continue reading Erste Ergebnisse aus der Tagebuchstudie präsentiert
Results from our Down to Earth study have been featured in an article about the communication of international climate conferences. Imke Hoppe was interviewed as a spokesperson of our team by editor Jan Wisniewski from the magazine “Communication Director” and talked about the public’s perception of the COP21.
Unfortunately, the article is not available for free, but the first two pages can be read in the online preview of the issue (Communication Director 3/2016, pp. 50-54).
Our research group has published a new working paper which summarizes research on climate change in the media.
The questions addressed are how media coverage of climate change contributes to the social construction of climate change, what kind of patterns can be found in the climate change debate and what effects climate change coverage has on the public. It also includes a chapter on Hamburg and Northern Germany as a case study.
Continue reading New working paper: Climate change in the media
The Online Media Monitor will be composed of different modules. We are still working on the other modules, especially the tool for analyzing online news media.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill
Quite a few commentators of the results of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (November/December 2015) have evoked this quote from Winston Churchill. It seems that, indeed, Paris marks the end of the beginning of debating anthropogenic climate change.
Continue reading “The End of the Beginning” – Booklet with Blog Posts
How do German citizens perceive climate change? What do they know about climate politics? And how do they evaluate national and international efforts against climate change?
Within the framework of our “Down to Earth” study, we aimed to answer these and further questions with an online survey with more than 2000 persons, conducted in Germany two weeks before this year’s climate conference in Paris.
When 196 nations met in Paris for COP21, the event naturally attracted global attention. It also fostered transnational debates on Twitter.
The Internet and more specifically social media enable many-to-many communication without the limitations of physically doing so, e.g having to convene in one geographical location. I wanted to find out the extent to which COP21 had “gone global” on Twitter. Besides this rather specific question, I was also interested in the general impact of COP21 on Twitter.
Continue reading Two weeks on Twitter: COP21, smoking heads and tweets from outer space
During the past two weeks of the UN summit, we have read about the problems that civil society actors have faced in making their voices heard.
Following on from the November 13 Paris terror attacks protests and other public events were banned in the city. Under these circumstances, social media represent a means through which civil society organisations can stand up for what they believe in and receive public attention.
In this blog post, I want to take a look at the climate change debate taking place on twitter, and the actors participating in it. During the conference, I have collected tweets using Google Tags based on the hashtag #climatechange. The following preliminary analyses are based on tweets collected between 30th of November and 8th of December 2015.
Continue reading Civil Society Actors in the #Climatechange Debate
As the climate negotiations in Paris near their final rounds, some might be surprised by rather contradictory developments, which relate to the much discussed 2 degree threshold.
This limit aims to keep warming within 2°C of the pre-industrial average.While the emissions reduction pledges put forward by the countries ahead of COP 21 in Paris were not sufficiently ambitious to keep within this limit, in the final phase of the negotiations many countries wish for an even lower limit: below 1.5 degrees.
Continue reading Lost on the Road to Paris? The Framing of a 2 degree warming limit 2009-2014
Anyone with a passing interest in climate change will know how intractably difficult international negotiations have proved in the past, reaching a low-point at Copenhagen.
Whatever the outcome this week in Paris, the preponderance of ‘square brackets’ in the latest draft document (signifying those issues still to be resolved) indicates that the task remains troublesome. While a scientific consensus on the basics of climate change has been established, a political consensus has been less forthcoming1,2. One reason for this is that climate change is not a uniquely scientific issue, but a public issue involving science3. We need to explore the public meanings of climate change, and allow these meanings to inform the debate around political responses to climate change. I suggest that one way to scratch the surface of such meanings is through the vibrant use of Twitter around the COP21 event4.
Continue reading Public meanings in Paris : Analysing Twitter hashtag trends from COP21