Project: How active listening can help us better understand climate anxiety
Date: September 2021
At Ripple Research, we deployed our state-of-the-art analytical tools and sentiment analysis to reveal the dominant narratives surrounding the global conversation around climate anxiety and tangential topics.
Evolving the climate
anxiety research agenda
As the climate emergency continues to unravel, citizens across the world are experiencing an overwhelming sense of existential fear. Meanwhile, the field of climate psychology remains relatively unexplored. The direct correlation between mental health disorders, negative emotions and extreme weather events requires further investigation and the use of large-scale social data to go beyond traditional research techniques.
At Ripple Research, we deployed our state-of-the-art analytical tools and sentiment analysis to reveal the dominant narratives surrounding the global conversation around climate anxiety and tangential topics.
Through our active listening methodology and perceptions analysis, we were able to discover real, unprompted conversations that the communities most vulnerable to the impact of climate change are having. It was important to build on resources that until now, have been predominantly western centric. This will enable us to better understand the phenomenon of climate anxiety and spur corrective action by identifying antidotes and understanding how they can be decimated to help the global population.
Our approach
To gain a coherent picture of the current landscape of climate anxiety, we collected open-source intelligence including public news sources, blog posts, news articles and social media posts from the period of November 2018 – November 2020.
This dataset consisted of over 1 million posts from 567,000 authors that had a total reach of over 1.8 billion.
Conversation volume
+1 m
Unique authors
567 k
Total reach
1.8 bn
What we discovered
Through our high-tech high-touch approach, we traced the emotions related to climate anxiety and were able to identify dominant emotion curves associated with fear and sadness, particularly during the time period of September 2019 and January 2020.
For example, fear reached an absolute peak during the study on 24th September 2019 when activist Greta Thunberg delivered one of her most famous addresses to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York stating “How dare you – you have stolen my dreams and my childhood”.
The Ripple Research temporal analysis unearthed related topics that are influencing climate anxiety too. For instance, ascertaining how climate activists around the world influence public consciousness in comparison to how traditional academic studies and thought leadership penetrate conversations.
Equipped with these insights, we have more clarity surrounding triggers of negative emotions related to the climate emergency and will be better prepared to plan strategic interventions that can guide citizens through these uncertain times. Using real-time data that taps into the public consciousness will help us to prevent the climate crisis from pushing communities apart and will enable policymakers, global institutions and businesses to create substantive and actionable goals that focus on the nexus of mental health and the climate emergency.