Climate Change Communication in the times of Coronavirus: Insights from Google Trends
By: Rohit Gupta
Tags: Climate Change, Data Science, Coronavirus

Climate Change Communication in the times of Coronavirus: Insights from Google Trends

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Coronavirus has made many scientists, environmentalists and activists anxious about its impact on the global climate change policies. There is a near-universal feeling of despair and helplessness since everyone is imagining that governments’ resolution to fight climate change will weaken as nations start to rebuild their battered economies. Indeed, if history provides any indication, these concerns are absolutely spot-on. Even though the carbon emissions decrease during the time of developmental crises (as has happened at the present time), the world economy tends to savagely return to the high emission trajectory in any post-crisis world. The years after the 2008 global financial recession recorded the highest annual growth in global carbon emissions. Viewed from this perspective, the Coronavirus pandemic could not have come at any worst time. Atmospheric CO2 concentration has now reached an all-time high of 414 ppm; January 2020 was the warmest recorded since the world history; for a day Antarctica recorded higher temperature than New Delhi during this year’s winter season and the window for action against climate change is fast waning.

However, some people have suggested that Coronavirus has also brought about an extreme shift in humanity’s paradigm and it can prove to be a turning point in battling Climate Change if the crisis can be utilized carefully. In this article, I look at changes in the way people searched for some key terms during the peak of Coronavirus pandemic in the google search engine to look for any patterns that can suggest future pathways for climate change communication and activism. In the past, statisticians have used the data from google trends to examine various phenomena like influenza-like illnesses, suicide occurrence, racism and the stock market. I start with graphical analysis and follow it up with a statistical analysis of trends of some of the search phrases to layout my narrative.

As you probably know, google trends provide data on long term trends (five years) of phrases searched in the google engine. In the following graphs, Y-axis depicts the intensity of search, in relative terms. So, the value of 100 percent denotes the timing of peak interest in that phrase in the 5-year period, other values in the graph are relative to this peak value.

A cursory look at the trends of lockdown, pandemic, Coronavirus and quarantine terms shows the quantum jump in their search history starting near last week of February and 1st week of March when the whole world started realizing the gravity of the disease. Indeed, there is no big revelation here and these terms do not need any statistical analysis to bring out the difference in trends.

Based on conjectured associations with Coronavirus, I analyzed following other phrases in google trends: family, love, travel, environment, nature, economy and climate change. Out of these terms, graphical trends on love are pretty clear — people are steadily losing interest in it!! There seems to be an annual spike around December-January each year, but even the peak of this spike is decreasing. What could be the reason for this annual cycle? I have no idea but will definitely like to know more about it :-)

Among the other terms, travel and family graphs show a clear deviation from the previous year trends. I did a statistical analysis — boxplot, ANOVA and Tukey test for these search terms (limited to the 1 March-17 May for 5 years). Here are the results,

Boxplot for Climate Change

ANOVA test for Climate change

TUKEY test for Climate Change

ANOVA test for Climate change suggests a statistically significant difference in the means of different years; TUKEY test confirms that the difference is coming mainly due to years 2019 and 2018. It seems that after a low of 2018, search for climate change gained high traction in 2019, but it has come down in 2020 (though not as much as the level of 2018). This can be confirmed from the box plot too.

Boxplot for Economy

ANOVA test for Economy

TUKEY test for Economy

Like climate change, search for economy too shows statistically different trends among the last five years as per ANOVA. TUKEY test confirms that the difference is driven by the year 2020, and a perusal of Boxplot shows people are searching a lot more about ‘Economy’ than the previous years.

Boxplot for Environment

ANOVA test for Environment

TUKEY test for Environment

All the three statistical analysis show that there is NO significant difference among the last 5 years in the search patterns for ‘Environment’. Hence, at least on the basis of google search, we can say that there does not seem to be any increase in concern for the environment during Coronavirus pandemic.

Box plot for Family

ANOVA test for family

TUKEY test for family

This is interesting. ANOVA confirms a statistically significant difference, which is confirmed by TUKEY test and the difference is being driven by the year 2020. As box plot show, people searched a lot more about family during pandemic months in 2020 than the earlier years.

Box plot for Nature

ANOVA test for Nature

TUKEY test for Nature

Here is another interesting result. ANOVA test shows that there is a difference between the search patterns of last 5 years, TUKEY test shows that the difference is driven by the year 2019 and 2020. Box plot suggests that people were searching for Nature in a fairly predictable fashion in the last 4 years, however, they suddenly started to search more during the pandemic months of the year 2020.

Box plot for Travel

ANOVA test for travel

TUKEY test for Travel

Search patterns for Travel show the exact opposite of nature, Boxplot shows that people suddenly started searching less for travel in the lockdown months of 2020 and ANOVA and TUKEY test confirm that this pattern is statistically different than the previous papers.

DISCUSSION

If google trends give any indication about what people are thinking most, it confirms the fear of climate change scientists that the increase in focus on climate change achieved in previous years has been lost in public psyche during the Coronavirus pandemic. However, the situation is not so hopeless, as despite the immediate crisis of Coronavirus, the search levels of Climate Change in 2020 were better than 2018 and about the levels of 2017. Statistical analysis also corroborates that comparatively, people thought very less about travel in these months. Instead, economy and family occupied their minds. Interestingly, there does not seem to be any increase (or decrease) in environment consciousness but definitely people searched a lot more about nature than in previous years.

For climate change communication, above investigation can provide important lessons. Behavioural science has four important things to say about the humanity’s willingness to change — we do not want to change fundamentally (status quo bias); we value losses more than gains (loss aversion); it is important how various options are framed (choice architecture) and we think about temporally distant events in a relatively abstract manner (construal level theory). Status quo bias implies two things — individuals stick to defaults, and the best time to change a person’s behaviour is when she is already experiencing a transition. In some respects, Coronavirus has changed our default behaviour in the most extreme way overnight. Secondly, the ongoing calamity has made people rediscover the fragility of many things which were earlier taken for granted. The well-being of near and dear ones and friends, a reliable job and simple joys of travelling and exploring the world are no longer secure. If climate change messaging can use the choice architecture provided by the Coronavirus to frame the future world, people will probably choose to avoid loss of these precious things over short term economic benefits accruing from a fossil-fuel economy. The Coronavirus pandemic has raised the credibility of researchers and scientists like never before, and this enhanced trustworthiness can be used to educate people about the perils of climate change. After all, there is a near scientific unanimity that global warming is likely to cause upheavals and tragedies at a much larger scale than what we are witnessing now. A surge in the outbreak of pandemics, unmanageable sea-level rise, unpredictable weather, erratic patterns of droughts and floods and increase in the frequency and intensity of wildfires are some of the many extreme events predicted by the scientists. The unfolding catastrophe has shown humanity a glimpse of how such a world would look like, and hence brought the temporally distant impact of climate change much closer. As Winston Churchill said, ‘never waste a good crisis’, it is now up to policymakers and climate change scientists to exploit the turn of the events in a way that helps the cause of combating climate change.