Learning from climate change news: Is the world on the same page?

RESEARCH ARTICLE Learning from climate change news: Is the world on the same page? Stijn EikelboomID1☯¤*, Marc Esteve-Del-ValleID2☯¤, Malvina Nissim3☯¤ 1 Department of Language Technology, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands, 2 Research Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands, 3 Center for Language and Cognition, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. ¤ Current address: Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands * s.e.eikelboom@rug.nl Abstract Climate change challenges countries around the world, and news media are key to the pub- lic’s awareness and perception of it. But how are news media approaching climate change across countries? With the problem of climate change and its solution being global, it is key to determine whether differences in climate change news reports exist and what they are across countries. This study employs supervised machine learning to uncover topical and terminological differences between newspaper articles on climate change. An original data- set of climate change articles is presented, originating from 7 newspapers and 3 countries across the world, and published in English during 26 Conference of the Parties (COP) meet- ings from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). Three aspects are used to discriminate between articles, being (1) countries, (2) political orienta-

tions, and (3) COP meetings. Our results reveal differences with regard to how newspaper articles approach climate change globally. Specifically, climate change-related terminology of left-oriented newspapers is more prevalent compared to their right-oriented counterparts. Also, over the years, newspapers’ climate change-related terminology has evolved to con- vey a greater sense of urgency. Introduction Of the many challenges that mankind will face during the coming decades, it is likely that cli- mate change will be one of the most pressing and demanding. Since the late 19th century, aver- age global temperature has already risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius, which can largely be attributed to human-made emissions (climate.nasa.gov/evidence/). The sixth assessment report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) points out that there is a more than 50% chance that global temperature rise will reach or surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2021 and 2040 (ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/). Therefore, climate change shall be high on the global agenda of scientific research, politics, and eventually every citizen. An important means of calling attention to climate change is the (usually) yearly gathering of the Conference of the Parties (COP) from the United Nations Framework Convention on PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297644 March 20, 2024 1 / 27 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Eikelboom S, Esteve-Del-Valle M, Nissim M (2024) Learning from climate change news: Is

the world on the same page? PLoS ONE 19(3): e0297644. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0297644 Editor: Michael Flor, Educational Testing Service (ETS), UNITED STATES Received: March 27, 2023 Accepted: January 9, 2024 Published: March 20, 2024 Copyright: © 2024 Eikelboom et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data used in this study was collected from Nexis Uni under license of the University of Groningen (UG). We are not the owner of the data. As we have verified with the Digital Competence Center of the UG, it can therefore not be shared publicly for legal reasons, however much we would like to. All code employed, plots generated and most informative features yielded in this study are available on DataverseNL: https://doi.org/10.34894/AMISPR. Together with the Methodology (e.g., steps and queries) in the manuscript, this is everything required by licensees to reproduce the data.