Climate Conversation Maps

The Climate Conversation Map (CCM) surfaces the volume of climate change articles posted on Facebook, and how people interact with them around the world. Researchers and nonprofits in the climate space use these maps to inform the climate debate and deliver new resources. These maps marry data science research, computing power, and aggregated, de-identified platform data to summarize and map the prevalence of these conversations and provide insight into where, when, and how often people share or react to links related to climate change on the Facebook app.

This L3 (equivalent to US county-level) Climate Conversation Map shows hyperlocal patterns as a fraction of links related to climate change over the total number of links shared on Facebook week over week.

Features

Privacy Preserving

All data is aggregated and de-identified to preserve user privacy. We also apply a threshold of a minimum number of people sharing these types of links, only displaying data for regions that meet this threshold requirement.

Climate Data

Climate conversation maps provide insight into where, when and how often people share or react to links related to climate change on Facebook. These maps fill a gap in the available data on the topic of climate.

Global Coverage

The information is being updated weekly world-wide. These global maps are aggregated on 2 different levels, L1 (country-level) and L3 (equivalent to US county)

Facebook’s climate conversation data is extremely compelling. It’s high volume, high veracity data covering a variety of temporal and spatial aspects of climate change engagement. Relative to traditional survey methods, the climate conversation data also feels a lot more representative of actual population-level conversations. In short, to the best of my knowledge, the dataset is the largest and richest source of information on climate conversation engagement available. Subsequent benefits of the data include accurate predictions of (a) climate conversation shifts and (b) if these shifts are keeping pace with society’s need to change. NGOs and policy-makers can then use this information to tailor messaging and better-manage our inevitable transition. The outcome is proactive change based on conversation clarity.”

Brian Spisak, Harvard University

Who Uses Climate Conversation Maps

Universities and researchers

Partners have proposed various use cases, including: tracking social media outreach, measuring impacts of campaigns, understanding online reaction toward climate events, characterizing the temporal evolution of climate conversation, and etc.

Non-profit organizations

Non-profits responding to natural disasters could gain insights on understanding regional trends in climate-related conversations or to track awareness of disasters being linked to climate change.

The percentage of shared climate change content in Australia for the week of December 15, 2019.

The percentage of shared climate change content in Australia for the week of January 12, 2020.

From August 2019 through February 2020, Australia was the country with the highest percentage of climate-change-related...

Methodology

The Climate Conversation Map (CCM) surfaces the volume of climate change articles posted on Facebook, and how people interact with them around the world. To create the maps, an automated system pulls the daily volume of total external link shares on Facebook, as well as the number of reshares and comments/reactions to the links. The system then flags the subset of links containing the keywords “climate change” or “global warming” across 21 major languages (determined by population size and number of active Facebook users). Each week, the resulting information is de-identified and aggregated. In areas where the number of people sharing these types of links is greater than 10, the system computes the absolute number of links related to climate change and the relative percentage of total links shared. The result is a series of color-coded world maps that update weekly. Dark green areas indicate climate change conversation hotspots, whereas lighter green indicates less active areas. One of the things we’ve already heard from partners is that they want the ability to identify top stories driving the conversation, so we worked with CrowdTangle to build a Climate Conversation Live Display. This public Live Display searches for “climate change” and “global warming” in the same 21 languages used in the Climate Conversation Map.

Case Studies

In the News

Facebook’s Climate Conversation Map reveals reactions to environmental news Venture Beat

Learn More & Contact Us

Read our tech blog here. Read our Newsroom Post here. We are excited to share these tools with leading researchers and nonprofits in the climate space. Those interested in accessing the Climate Conversation Map for nonprofit or research use should email us at climateconvomaps@fb.com.