Tag: climate change

Climate Reporting: 5 Tips for Sourcing Stories Online

Posted on | by Thais Lobo

The first of a two-part series providing critical considerations for reporting on environmental issues with social media data

By Thais Lobo, Rina Tsubaki, Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Gray and Gabriele Colombo

Social media platforms and online services can reveal how forests, rivers, mountains, animals — and human encounters with them — are seen, valued, and contested in near real-time. This isn’t without its challenges. Online platforms shape what we see and whose voices are amplified. While they can’t be treated as neutral reflections of how we relate to the environment, when taken as indications rather than comprehensive or unbiased sources, they can be useful leads for climate reporting.

This piece is the first of a two-part series with critical considerations for  climate data journalists interested in how online activity about environmental issues can reveal new story angles and generate evidence to support on-the-ground reporting. This first piece focuses on practical tips for searching and analysing digital data, while the second explores how to add depth and context to those online findings.

The checklist series draws on findings from our research on online engagement with forest restoration, carried out as part of the EU-funded SUPERB project. As part of the project, we looked at online activity across five digital platforms linked to twelve European forest sites where SUPERB is working on ecological restoration. The insights gathered here aim to support climate reporting with and about digital platforms, considering both the opportunities and limitations these sources offer to journalists.

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Exploring forest hashtags in COP27 Twitter with the European Forest Institute

Posted on | by Jonathan Gray

The following is a cross-post from Rina Tsubaki at the European Forest Institute, drawing on digital methods recipes and approaches developed with the Public Data Lab as part a broader collaboration around the SUPERB project on upscaling forest restoration.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has prompted confusion among its users and concerns about the platform’s future. Musk’s tweets are gathering daily attention due to large-scale layoffs and safety concerns around the new paid blue verification mark. To make things worse, as its engineers are on their way out of the door, users are also experiencing various technical glitches on the platform. Millions of users – including journalists, researchers and organisations – are already signing up on alternative platforms to be prepared for the platform’s deterioration and demise.

While no one can predict Twitter’s future, it remains widely used by politicians, scientists, companies, NGOs and influencers who are still busy posting on the platform. This includes COP27 in Egypt, where Twitter was one of the main platforms to report on the event. #cop27 has been tweeted over 2.85 million times since 5 November 2022. 

Social media platforms can give us additional insights into how broader publics make connections between forest restoration and other social, economic and environmental issues. To see which issues and narratives around forest restoration have been brought up on Twitter in the lead-up to the event, we’ve carried out a series of small explorations based on the digital methods recipes developed by our colleagues at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London and the Public Data Lab who are part of the SUPERB consortium led by EFI. This has been a good way to see if EFI could use these methods independently to understand international events as they unfold.

We usually see a spike in hashtag usage a few days before global events like the COPs. Using #cop27, we collected 217,189 tweets between 5 and 7 November 2022. We then examined the top 1000 hashtags to see which kinds of forest-related issues are present. 

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