Climate Change and Covid-19: A Change in Attention and its Repercussions
By Brianna Hartato
Climate change and activism around it have recently gained significant traction in popular culture. The success of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future climate strikes, which has mobilized over 18 million people worldwide, and films like Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, which broke Netflix’s viewing records, signal that climate change has become an issue that many are aware of and are expressing tremendous concern about. Such a trend is also reflected in public opinion surveys. While the American public’s concerns about climate change reached a record high based on key indicators in the September 2021 iteration of the nationally-representative Climate Change and the American Mind survey (n = 1018), results from the same survey conducted from April to May 2, 2022, highlight that a majority of Americans (65%) are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, and three in ten (30%) indicate that they are “very worried.” Similarly, in the 2021 Eurobarometer survey by the European Commission, 18% of Europeans selected climate change as the most serious problem we face; moreover, 93% of European Union citizens view climate change as a serious problem.
Significant strides have been made to raise awareness about the catastrophic issue; nevertheless, since the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the globe, media coverage and attention have shifted away from climate change. Exploring the pandemic’s impact on the content and frequency of climate change discussions on Twitter from 2019 to 2021, scholars Oleg Smirnov and Pei-Hsun Hsieh show that as the number of Covid cases and deaths increased, climate change discussions decreased on Twitter, even though there were more active daily Twitter users and extensive climate change coverage on traditional media. They also discovered that the increase in Covid-19 cases was associated with a decrease in negative climate change tweets.
Supporting Smirnov’s and Hsieh’s findings, scholars Adrian Rauchfleisch, Dario Siegen, and Daniel Volger used news media and Twitter data from April 2019 to October 2020 to estimate how the pandemic, which they identified as a “killer issue,” moved public attention away from climate change in Switzerland. They found a strong correlation between Swiss news media attention and Swiss climate change debates on Twitter. They also discovered that after February 2020, the number of tweets and news articles about Covid-19 increased while tweets and articles about climate change simultaneously decreased. On average, the researchers’ model estimates that there were 55% or 534 fewer tweets about climate change per day after February 2020 due to the pandemic. Similarly, they estimate that Swiss news media attention on climate change decreased by 46% on average per day (60 articles fewer) than before February 2020.
While the change in focus is understandable, what are its potential repercussions on addressing climate change? As Rauchfleisch, Siegen, and Volger note, discussions on the Covid-19 pandemic have dominated online debate and taken significant media attention, turning climate change from what they call a routine or well-discussed issue into a struggling one. According to the 2020 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, online platforms, including social media, have overtaken television as the most frequently used news source in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. Therefore, social media platforms and online news are the two avenues through which most people gain access to crucial information. Through a 61-million-person randomized experiment, scholar Robert M. Bond and his colleagues have also established that political mobilization messages delivered through social media platforms like Facebook influence real-world voting behavior. Significantly, they emphasize that the effect of social transmission on Facebook, the spreading of messages from one user to another, was greater than the effects of the messages themselves. Considering such findings, a shift in topical discussions and media coverage may impede mobilization on climate-related issues as it decreases its reach and online visibility.
It is vital to acknowledge that climate change will persist long after the Covid-19 pandemic, and its effects will only get more extreme. While a survey conducted by the International Monetary Fund suggests that the global pandemic has increased concerns about climate change and support for environmentally friendly recovery policies, the pandemic has unfortunately delayed international climate change negotiations, brought previously ignored environmental issues to the light, and disrupted scientific research in the area of study. As there is limited space for attention in the cyber landscape, bringing attention back to climate change through online outlets and platforms is imperative as individuals around the world have increasingly turned to cyberspace to exchange ideas and obtain information that may potentially influence their real-world actions. The devastation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic should not be diminished, but what has occurred in the past two years show that other pressing issues have been sidelined. Ultimately, now more than ever, discussing and recognizing climate change on online platforms is integral to upholding the movement’s momentum.
