Archive for category: EH16

by Diana Maynard and Kalina Bontcheva,
the University of Sheffield

Collective awareness about climate change is an ongoing problem because there is such a wealth of information available, which can be confusing, contradictory and difficult to interpret. In order to help citizens understand environmental concerns, and to help organisations better inform and target interested people with campaigns, we have developed an open source toolkit to analyse social media data on the topic of climate change. The toolkit comprises methods for extracting, aggregating, and visualising actionable knowledge, based on automatic analysis of large volumes of text.

The key terms, poster types and sentiments expressed in online discussions are extracted, along with key indicators of climate change, and are stored in a semantic search tool, which enables complex real-time searches over large volume social media stream.

During the Earth Hour 2016, we collected and analysed in real time all tweets related to the events, extracted all this information automatically, and posted tweet updates showing aggregated statistics on the types of language being used in English Earth Hour tweets, opinions expressed towards the event, and the types of users posting on the topics.

You can see some of the results in our demo here.

by Hester van Zuthem and Meia Wippoo
WAAG society

How do we get to a point where people not only share concerns, but also act upon them? How do we turn every citizen into a conscious and active citizen?

Over the past two years, we have looked at what and how people, organisations, and governments communicate about climate change (and how these communications are valued) using data analyses and experiments. But, we’ve also worked on practical solutions and tools for behavioural change.

We want to position the ‘climate change agents’ as designers who can be immersed in the world of the target group to really understand what the needs are and what suits people best. In other words: not trying to convince people to adopt a range of ideas, but to adopt to their way of life and change with them.

This year, we will finalise a Behavioural Change Framework, a model that will be developed for ‘change agents’, to frame the situation in which people are willing to change their behaviour. In the model, several existing theories and methods (i.e. co-creation, marketing, and social-psychological) are combined and integrated with the tools for analysis developed within DecarboNet. In the end, it could be used in all kinds of contexts that ask for a behavioural change, not just the climate situation.

More about the work of WAAG: http://waag.org/en/blog/how-can-we-change-our-behaviour

by Rik Temmink
Green Energy Options (geo)

In 2014, geo joined forces with a number of academic and charitable organisations including the Open University, the University of Sheffield and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the DecarboNet project, a 3-year research project funded by the European Commission aimed at investigating the potential of social platforms in mitigating climate change.

Its main contribution to the project is the company’s extensive experience in energy trials, including the Visible Energy Trial. In the course of the project, geo helped develop a “decarbonisation methodology” that recognizes the different stages of understanding and engagement of households and uses this insight to change people’s energy consumption behaviour for the better, curbing wastage and reducing the carbon footprint of trial participants.

geo provided 250 electricity monitors with smartplugs to households (mainly in the UK). These were used by trial participants to understand their electricity consumption, not just at a “whole home” level but by appliance, using smartplugs to monitor detailed electricity consumption. Participants were encouraged to compare and discuss their findings with other trial users via the EnergyUse.eu portal, and with others using social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

In particular, the DecarboNet project has contributed to geo’s understanding of the power of social media in engaging people in the quest to reduce energy consumption, and its use in ultimately limiting the impact of household energy consumption on climate change.