Transitions in climate and energy discourse between Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy

Cody, Emily M.; Stephens, Jennie C.; Bagrow, James P.; Dodds, Peter Sheridan; Danforth, Christopher M.

doi:10.1007/s13412-016-0391-8

Cited by 19 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Words that often appear together are (by assumption) more likely to be part of the same topic. Though relatively new, LDA has recently begun to be applied to studying climate change discourse (Cody et al 2017 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local adaptation policy responses to extreme weather events

2020

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At a global level, climate change is expected to result in more frequent and higher-intensity weather events, with impacts ranging from inconvenient to catastrophic. The potential for disasters to act as "focusing events" for policy change, including adaptation to climate change risk, is well known. Moreover, local action is an important element of climate change adaptation and related risk management efforts. As such, there is a good reason to expect local communities to mobilize in response to disaster events, both with immediate response and recovery-focused activities, as well as longer-term preparedness and adaptation-focused public policy changes. However, scholars also note that the experience of disaster does not always yield policy change; indeed, disasters can also result in policy inertia and failure, perhaps as often or more often than major policy change. This study poses two key research questions. First, we ask to what degree policy change occurs in communities impacted by an extreme weather event. Second, we seek to understand the conditions that lead to adaptation-oriented policy adoption in response to an extreme weather event. Our results suggest two main recipes for future-oriented policy adoption in the wake of an extreme weather event. For both recipes, a high-impact event is a necessary condition for future-oriented policy adoption. In the first recipe for change, policy adoption occurs in Democratic communities with highly focused media attention. The second, less expected recipe for change involves Republican communities that have experienced other uncommon weather events in the recent past. We use a comparative case approach with 15 cases and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis methods. Our approach adds to the existing literature on policy change and local adaptation by selecting a mid-N range of cases where extreme weather events have the potential to act as focusing events, thereby sidestepping selection on the dependent variable. Our approach also takes advantage of a novel method for measuring attention, the latent Dirichlet allocation approach.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local adaptation policy responses to extreme weather events

2020

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“…Changing atmospheric convection processes associated with climate change in the United States have contributed to more extreme temperatures and more variable precipitation which may be contributing to recent increases in windstorm frequency and intensity (Berz, 1993 ; Karl et al., 1996 ; Moore, 2017 ). For example, the number and variability of tornadoes and supercell hurricanes increased drastically from 1995 to 2006, with further increases in number and intensity during 2012–2017 (Brooks et al., 2014 ; Changnon, 2009 ; Cody et al., 2017 ; Emanuel, 2017 ; Moore, 2017 ; Rahmstorf, 2017 ; Wurman et al., 2021 ). Unfortunately, urban sprawl and built environments, particularly in densely populated metropolitan areas, also have increased the risk of tornado damage (Rosencrants & Ashley, 2015 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long‐term effects of a tornado: Impacts on woody native vegetation and invasive Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) in an urban forest

Culley,

Bécus,

Cameron

2024

Ecology and Evolution

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As tornados become increasingly common with global climate change, recovery of the woody vegetation in temperate forests is imperative to maintain an intact ecosystem. In many urbanized landscapes, invasive species are also increasing and could interfere with natural recovery from environmental disturbance. We quantified the impact and 17‐year recovery from a major tornado in a temperate deciduous forest. We used vegetational surveys in southwestern Ohio at the Harris M. Benedict Nature Preserve, where approximately a third of this site was damaged by a tornado in 1999. Plots were established in the tornado‐damaged area and the nearby undisturbed forest to examine forest recovery of trees/saplings, shrubs and vines, and tree seedlings during 2003, 2006, 2010, and 2016/2017. The number of tree saplings, shrubs, and vines increased immediately after the tornado, but then declined by 2010, relative to the undisturbed forest. Forest tree recruitment was lower in tornado‐damaged sites with fewer tree seedlings, but more saplings. Tree diversity was also affected by Agrilus planipennis (Emerald Ash borer) which targeted native ash trees within this time period. Despite an initial increase in shrubs and vines in the damaged area, the diversity and density of shrubs approached equality in both sites by 2016. Most shrubs in both sites were the invasive Lonicera maackii (Amur honeysuckle). In tornado sites, honeysuckle thinned out over time, leaving larger shrubs with greater mean basal diameter compared to the undisturbed forest. Other woody invasive species were also more prevalent in the damaged area, but increased in number in both locations by 2017. The forest has the capability to begin to recover from the initial tornado, but its future composition may differ from its initial trajectory due to invasive species, loss of ash trees, and anthropogenic impacts within the urban landscape.

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“…For the 2017 hurricane season, more money was spent more quickly to aid the victims of hurricanes Harvey and Irma than victims of Hurricane Maria, contributing to the significantly higher death toll and adverse public health outcomes in Puerto Rico [45]. While the attention and policies of government agencies are not usually dictated from Twitter, public attention certainly has some effect on the focus of agencies and allocation of government resources, and recently more attention has been focused on understanding the discourse on social media before, during, and after natural disasters [46][47][48][49][50][51] We structure our paper as follows. In Results, we examine the spatial associations between hurricanes and the attention they receive, we compute and compare measures of total attention, maximum daily attention, and non-parametric measures of the rate of attention decay for the most damaging hurricanes in the past decade.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hurricanes and hashtags: Characterizing online collective attention for natural disasters

et al. 2021

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We study collective attention paid towards hurricanes through the lens of n-grams on Twitter, a social media platform with global reach. Using hurricane name mentions as a proxy for awareness, we find that the exogenous temporal dynamics are remarkably similar across storms, but that overall collective attention varies widely even among storms causing comparable deaths and damage. We construct ‘hurricane attention maps’ and observe that hurricanes causing deaths on (or economic damage to) the continental United States generate substantially more attention in English language tweets than those that do not. We find that a hurricane’s Saffir-Simpson wind scale category assignment is strongly associated with the amount of attention it receives. Higher category storms receive higher proportional increases of attention per proportional increases in number of deaths or dollars of damage, than lower category storms. The most damaging and deadly storms of the 2010s, Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, generated the most attention and were remembered the longest, respectively. On average, a category 5 storm receives 4.6 times more attention than a category 1 storm causing the same number of deaths and economic damage.

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Transitions in climate and energy discourse between Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy

Cited by 19 publications

References 36 publications

Local adaptation policy responses to extreme weather events

Local adaptation policy responses to extreme weather events

Long‐term effects of a tornado: Impacts on woody native vegetation and invasive Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) in an urban forest

Hurricanes and hashtags: Characterizing online collective attention for natural disasters

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