Attention to climate change only temporarily diverted by COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted peoples’ daily lives and dominated the public discourse. It thus displaced people’s attention to and concerns about climate change. We analyze 13.5 million tweets on climate change posted before and after the onset of the pandemic (2018–2021) and show that attention to climate dropped substantially in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. While research has helped to explain this drop in the context of issue attention theory, our analysis highlights a remarkable recovery in attention in 2021 towards pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, our large-scale, transformer-based text analysis reveals important thematic shifts during this period. In particular, we show a sustained drop in attention to activist movements and subsequently an increased focus on climate causes and climate solutions. This means, that while the climate change discourse in general recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, activist movements such as the school protests that have mobilized millions around the globe in 2019 have measurably lost traction on Twitter.

How do protests shape discourse? Causal methods for determining the impact of protest events on newspaper coverage

“…They use topic modelling to find major themes in discourse, and plot the quantitative evolution of these themes over time from 2018 to 2021, overlaying it with information about the occurrence of the semi-annual global climate strikes. Repke et al (2023) explore the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on climate discourse on Twitter. They observe that in general there is only a temporary negative attention decrease, but that topics related to protest movements have been very strong in 2019 before the pandemic and much less so in 2020 and 2021.…”