Climate Change and Our Future: Anticipating Trends and Challenges Using Media Data

Abstract

This paper proposes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the future perspectives of climate change. First, it analyzes the possibilities of using the media as an information source for anticipating trends and challenges in this area through exploring the topics that have been actively discussed in the news in the recent 5 years. Second, qualitative and quantitative approaches are combined in this study in order to identify trends of different categories: social, technological, economic, environmental, political and values/culture. It allows integrating the results of trends monitoring obtained from qualitative and quantitative sources and create a complex map of trends. Qualitative approach is based on the literature review and consultations with the experts, while quantitative analysis includes collecting the news from Factiva database and processing it in Vantage Point software using bibliometric analysis, natural language processing, statistical analysis and principal component analysis. The results shown that 58% of trends were validated by the news and its contribution to the final trends list accounts for 25% on average, which means that the media can be considered as a useful additional data source for validating and updating trends. The results of this multidisciplinary study can be of interest to researchers, economists, business representatives and policy makers that are involved in the climate change related activities.

Keywords: climate change, foresight, trends monitoring, news, quantitative methods

JEL Classification: O33