Climate Engagement in a Digital Age: Exploring the Drivers of Participation in Climate Discourse Online in the Context of COP21

Abstract

Various scholars underscore the importance of public engagement with climate change to successfully respond to the challenges of global warming. However, although online media provide various new opportunities to actively engage in climate discourse through sharing, evaluating or publishing climate-related content online, so far very little is known about the drivers of public participation in climate discourse online. Against this background this study tested a theoretical model on the effects of media and interpersonal communication on participation in climate discourse online using data from a representative online survey of German citizens (n=1,392) carried out while the climate summit in Paris 2015. Over all, the results show that receiving information on climate change from social media (social networks, Twitter, blogs), active information seeking online, and interpersonal conversations about COP21 strongly encourage participation in climate discourse online. Moreover, results provide relevant insights on the role of interest in climate politics, personal issue relevance and climate scepticism as preconditions of communication effects.

Analyzing reputation of Swiss universities on Twitter–The role of stakeholders, content and sources

“…More recently, the question emerged as to what extent social media shape public debates about science, and thus also shape the reputation of scientific organizations. Similar to research on news media coverage, studies have focused on controversial topics and research practices, for example, the debate about climate change on Twitter (Anderson and Huntington, 2017;Arlt et al, 2018a;Fownes et al, 2018) or nuclear energy (Arlt et al, 2018b). Although the role of scientific organizations was discussed in some of these studies, research that focuses on scientific organizations or universities and their reputation has rarely been conducted to date.…”

Framing Climate Change in the 5th Estate: Comparing Online Advocacy and Denial Webpages and Their Engagement

“…The present framework assumes that these emerging digital media outlets present at least as many affordances for engagement, relative to the legacy media modalities profiled in McCombs and Shaw's (1972) seminal study (see Groshek & Groshek, 2013). Regarding specific engagement processes, exposure to COP21 information online encourages participation in climate change discourse online, specifically blogs and social network sites (Arlt et al, 2018).…”

Pro-Science, Anti-Science and Neutral Science in Online Videos on Climate Change, Vaccines and Nanotechnology

“…Editing a scientific video implies a greater effort than publishing a post or a tweet, and can also imply greater intentionality; besides, its high potential impact has made video a key tool to distribute scientific information to the public (León & Bourk, 2018). The problem is that the dynamics of online circulation of videos may be favoring misinformation, even more so when, in topics such as climate change, deniers and skeptics participate more actively than pro-science people in social media (Arlt, Hoppe, Schmitt, De Silva-Schmidt, & Brüggemann, 2018).…”