Understanding the state of these debates surrounding approaches to coping with climate change, where opposing views clash and compete, is an analytical need of stakeholders and issue experts working in this issue space. The state of climate change science, including mitigation and adaptation, is regularly surveyed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in support of international climate change policy negotiations. For instance, Working Group II of the IPCC undertook a mapping of climate change science with a particular focus on adaptation, and its fifth assessment report published in March 2014 noted a general increase in scientific literature on the topic, with the volume of publications doubling in less than five years, and with adaptation becoming a central area of research (IPCC, 2014, p. 2-3).

Building on these findings, we extend the questions regarding the state of climate change debates outside the scientific literature and into mainstream digital media. In doing so we ask: To what extent is adaptation organising climate change discourse not only in climate science but in digital media as well? And, what aspects or sub-issues from the adaptation discourse resonate most in these spaces? Where is the link between conflict and climate change being recognized?

We set out to map the state of the climate change debate online, on the one hand, by locating adaptation in relation to three discourses about climate change (scepticism towards the man-made origins of climate change, mitigation or preventing climate change by acting on its causes, and conflict as linked to climate change), and, on the other hand, by capturing the different definitions of adaptation that circulate, in an attempt to map its substance. Is adaptation leading the conversation? And, what is adaptation and whose definitions hold sway?

The digital media under consideration are Twitter, Google and Amazon. The three platforms are selected so as to provide a broad range of digital media use, and at the same time capture data about three typical online activities: sharing, searching and purchasing. That is, we seek to capture how users share ideas (on Twitter), search for information (in Google) and buy books related to climate change issues (on Amazon). How is climate change and adaptation discussed on Twitter, and what do users consider worth sharing or updating in relation to climate change? Through search engines we look at what people find in Google when searching for climate change. We are also interested in how leading users of the Web in the climate change space prioritize the issues, so we query climate-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for their issue and campaign commitments. Thirdly, in the e-commerce platform amazon.com, we would like to know which books (and the issues treated in them) about climate change sell well. There is also a new literary genre or subgenre dealing with climate change, called Cli-fi or climate fiction. Given the freedom of movement of fiction writers and their capacity to unlock and also contribute future scenarios, we turn to writings where adaptation to climate change is no longer a plan for the future, but an everyday practice. How is society organized and life lived after climate change?

In all the analysis shows that online media follow scientific trends, and adaptation and especially the issue of ‘food’ are organizing the conversation online. The substance of the adaptation discourse, however, changes depending on who speaks as well as the media in which the discourse is situated. For instance, in Twitter more tweets are published about adaptation than mitigation, with human and animal victims capturing user’s attention (indicating a resonance of the vulnerability aspects of adaptation) and with NGOs most effectively using the platform to distribute their message, with successful hashtags and sources representing their voices. When querying Google’s search engine results returned for the search term [“climate change” OR “global warming”], for the four main approaches to climate change (scepticism, mitigation, adaptation and conflict), adaptation is not only more abundant, but it is also most likely to be hosted within institutional sources. Conflict, instead, appears to be an issue in the making, often addressed by news sources. Furthermore, on their websites NGOs working with climate change have food and water among other issues at the top of their agendas, as they are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events. And, by looking at amazon.com different ‘selling points’ of the climate change debate are noted. New terminologies appear in books as to brand the issue of conflict, for example ‘cold wars’ is employed to describe potential conflicts over the melting Arctic, while scepticism appears to be overtaken, as best-selling books on the topic as well as the popular hashtags on Twitter surprisingly speak for those sceptical of scepticism.

Twitter users have a say in determining how topics achieve high levels of popularity. For example, a successful campaign or a catchy hashtag can put an issue at the top of the news, and organize millions of people around it, even if momentarily. Consequently, the number of retweets, followers and updates have become common metrics used to gain insights about engagement with issues. One can learn, for instance, which aspects of a topic are more successful and travel better because they are being retweeted the most. With this in mind, we ask, how is climate change made into a matter of concern to be shared and circulated on Twitter? Are the users and sources that come together around adaptation different from those that do so for mitigation, scepticism and conflict? And, what hashtags and sources have influence in this space?  

To answer these questions we build profiles for each of the approaches to climate change (scepticism, mitigation, adaptation and conflict) by querying each of these in a climate change Twitter collection of over ten million tweets and noting for each of them: the number of tweets, the most mentioned users, hashtags, and domain names, most shared urls and retweets. Through this method, we let Twitter ‘tell’ us what issues are emerging around climate change.

Significantly more tweets addressing adaptation to climate change are published than are tweets linked to mitigation, and tweets related to scepticism and conflict are close in numbers to those published about adaptation. While adaptation and mitigation share issues, scepticism and conflict are distinct, distant spaces. The scepticism space is dominated by actors who are sceptical of climate change scepticism, and the conflict and violence space draws attention to newsworthy connections between climate and violence, including links between extreme drought and the Syrian conflict, and speculations about how climate change will bring conflict to places that are already struggling with resource shortages. It appears that while climate change denial is foregrounded and its vocabulary adopted by those who trust climate science, conflict emerges as a new type of issue, making its way into the mainstream.

In Twitter hashtags organize topics into streams and often the tweets associated with specific hashtags are analyzed as telling stories about events, be they conferences, elections or protests. What kind of stories emerge when we look at scepticism, mitigation, adaptation and conflict related hashtags?

Adaptation and mitigation top hashtags narrate the unfolding of events and have a heightened activity around summits and treaties, with the United Nations as protagonist. For example, #COP18 is the hashtag for the 18th Conference of the Parties, which took place in Doha and is present in both adaptation and mitigation tweets. #UNFCCC, standing for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is present in relation to mitigation. A noteworthy top hashtag is #agriculture, a food related issue, also present in both mitigation and adaptation tweets, but with a larger prevalence in the adaptation collection.

Slightly different, the climate conflict space draws connections between a mixture of controversial issues. Direct links between extreme weather and particular conflicts, such as the Syrian one, are made. The association between climate change and conflict is extended to the shootings in Sandy Hook and increasingly becoming intertwined with American politics (through hashtags related to Washington legislature, the conservative party and the current president), gun regulation (through the hashtag of the National Rifle Association) and a number of medical conditions, from autism to obesity and ADD. The relation here is not of consequence as with the Syrian conflict, but instead those that deny climate change are compared by users to those that deny the potential benefits that, for instance, a tougher policy on gun control in the United States might bring.

When studying controversies questions move beyond the substance (what issues are mentioned?), to inquire into who are the speakers, subjects and authorities. For climate change adaptation and mitigation the most mentioned users are international organizations working on the issue of food security. For example, the CGIAR (Research Program on Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security) ranks highly in both. Similarly, top users and hostnames are organizations, such as the Mask-Africa Food Security Program in the case of adaptation. In the case of mitigation, when looking at the type of content that circulates best through the most shared URLs, the organization Green Register, a blog dedicated to environmental sustainability news and eco-friendly living tips, ranks highly. The top users in the mitigation space are more diverse and include companies, academics and international organizations.

For climate change scepticism top users are websites sceptical of climate change scepticism and most shared content acknowledges the man-made origins of climate change. Differently from the other approaches, in the scepticism Twitter space news media ranks high and has clear protagonists, including Al Gore, as well as journalists and entrepreneurs infamous for their scepticism. Similarly, conflict is associated with news media and public figures, for instance radio show hosts (@hermancain), but also organizations with a humanitarian focus such as Oxfam and Greenpeace that address the humanitarian aspects of the environmental crisis.

Having zoomed into the most prominent issues and actors in climate change related tweets, where adaptation and food are leading issues, now the analysis takes a more panoptic approach. Hashtags included in the same tweets can form thematic clusters with an ecology of sub-issues illustrating the current state of climate action and adaptation.

Particularly interesting is the number of themed clusters of climate vulnerabilities and victims that can be identified within the climate change issue space on Twitter, ranging from vulnerable animals and habitats, to victims of extreme weather events. Other clusters tend to focus on geographical regions such as Australia, Canada and the US, albeit mainly in terms of climate change or global warming being an important topic on their political agenda. Clusters formed by hashtags related to official sources (UN and IPCC), climate activism and everyday weather remarks additionally show that most conversations on Twitter emerge around particular (current) events and other real time experiences. The network further displays clusters focused on the three different stages of climate change (scepticism, mitigation and adaptation), and the emerging perspective that climate change vulnerability and conflict might be connected (Arab Spring).

Our particular interest, as outlined above, lies in the extent to which adaptation is organising climate change discourse not only in climate science (IPCC, 2014, p. 2), but in other spaces as well. Consequently, we ask, when using the Google search engine what may one find in relation to climate change? Is adaptation a top ranking result? We may ask also whether the influential sources and the issues they bear are mainstream or if they are challenging official accounts. In all, how does the web organize and also provide accounts of the ongoing debate?

To begin, we query [“climate change or global warming”] in Google in June 2013 and capture the top 16 results. We find that the account of climate change organised by the top Google results aligns with official accounts from the scientific literature. Similarly to the scientific space where adaptation has become a central area of research, in the climate change web space adaptation is the most resonant issue, taking over from mitigation and scepticism. The next most resonant issue, conflict, is arguably more anticipative, given the manner in which it resonates (outside of the scientific literature as well as the NGO arena). News sources appear to be receptive towards the issue of climate change and conflict, and as such it is emerging as a fourth climate-related discourse, where violent reactions could follow climate instability and a failure to mitigate and to adapt.

Next, we looked at the web presence of two networks of organizations that are currently committed to working with climate change, the U.N. climate change network and an additional leading network of climate NGOs, compiled from the shared members of the Climate Action Network and TCKTCKTCK. We ask: What type of content populates the websites of these networks? Are they more committed to adaptation than to mitigation, conflict and scepticism? And, how do they define adaptation, and whose definitions are dominant?

We batch query the four dominant issues, scepticism, mitigation, adaptation and conflict, in the websites of U.N. agencies that work on climate change, and identify, similarly to the top Google results, that adaptation is recognised as a prominent issue, followed closely by mitigation, and conflict and scepticism as a distant fourth. Adaptation and conflict (which occupies the third place), are mostly framed in relation to issues of water and food, with the discourse around conflict highlighting food insecurity and resource depletion as a potential cause of instability and confrontations between communities. Subsequently, new victims resonate in this discourse, including the Arctic, refugees, and women, as a population that is and will continue to be disproportionately affected by climate change. Scepticism towards climate change as a phenomenon is not widely addressed by these organisations, and, when employed, the term ‘sceptic’ describes practices, measuring systems and standardisation processes. For example, biofuels are described as a threat to food security.

A closer reading of the sources that speak about food as an issue in the U.N. climate change space shows that ‘food’ is framed differently in the adaptation, mitigation, and conflict discourses. Producing food under changing weather conditions is an emerging global challenge addressed by adaptation. Mitigation is framed around energy and food and the potential food crisis is paired with solutions such as eco-farming, the reevaluation of livestock, agro forestry, fisheries, food grain banks and questions about the potential increase in food prices.

Furthermore we look at which U.N. agencies working on climate change are more committed to specific issues, in terms of hosting issue-related content on their websites. Most organisations appear to be more engaged with adaptation to climate change and only a few showed greater alignment with mitigation. The latter include the International Civil Aviation Association, discussing the impact of the aviation industry on the climate, the International Monetary Fund, exploring the monetary cost of addressing climate change, amongst other topics, the International Labor Organisation, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, using the term in relation to mitigating disasters, such as drought, and not the phenomenon of climate change itself.

In the case of climate NGOs we do not start with a list of predefined issues to determine their agenda, but read the issues prioritised by a list of 74 NGOs from dedicated sections on their websites. The list is compiled by triangulating members of two leading climate networks: the Climate Action Network and TCKTCKTCK. This analysis shows us that NGOs configure climate change as an environmental issue with concerns such as ‘water’, ‘oil’, ‘agriculture’, and ‘conservation’ resonating most, and as a humanitarian issue, with concerns such as ‘food’, ‘community’, ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘poverty’, ‘Israel’, ‘right’, ‘education’ and ‘health’ being most prominent.

What do people encounter when they search for books about climate change in amazon.com? What issues make it into best-selling lists and into people’s bookshelves or e-readers? Is the collection of best-selling books associated with climate change diverse or homogeneous? For example, are there any counter-works (for instance, a book sceptical of mitigation) amongst the most popular titles?

By analysing titles of books returned for queries related to four climate change discourses, through the co-word method, we find that adaptation to climate change as well as mitigation practices, and the emerging discourse of conflict, not only put forward different agendas, but they also depict different futures. Adaptation constantly highlights the urgency of modifying our social systems and infrastructures so in the future society can cope with the changes that will inevitably come, and in which losses are already calculated. The discourse around climate-motivated conflicts presents a future in which we have failed to successfully adapt. Mitigation, perhaps the most positive, depicts a future that can be altered and a planet that can be saved, even though literature that questions the approach has already made it into the best sellers.

A closer examination of adaptation book titles finds that adaptation-related literature focuses on the areas of management in relation to the environment and disasters, agricultural strategies as well as strategies pertaining to particular locations such as Africa, and science connected to proceedings and the idea of the ‘viable’. The words ‘policy’, ‘society’ and ‘human’ are closely related and come together around issues of human health and development, ethical adaptation, and a concern for the ‘human virtues for the future’. Furthermore, words employed in adaptation book titles, such as vulnerability, desertification, impacts and disasters, depict future scenarios that communicate a sense of urgency.

Best-selling literature on climate change mitigation has as central themes ‘energy’ and ‘solutions’, and employs a vocabulary where reduction, emissions, conservation and sustainability denote a more positive sentiment. This is emphasised by the inclusion of the term Planet Earth in association with verbs such as saving and fixing, which prove a successful framing for the issue. Moreover, this collection, in contrast to those associated with adaptation, includes titles that are critical of the mitigation approach and put its effectiveness into question.

The somewhat positive language of mitigation books is contrasted with the speculative outlook of best selling conflict literature. The central themes are natural resources linked to negative words such as ‘wars’ and ‘violent’. Book titles attempt to brand specific conflicts, for example, ‘cold front’ and ‘cold wars’ are terms used to describe possible confrontations over the melting Arctic, and ‘hot wars’ for those conflicts motivated by drought and desertification. Also, a unique set of terminologies depict an issue agenda that seems to be, along with conflict, gaining attention, including environmental discrimination, energy insecurity, climate liability, and water security. Book titles, in a language evocative of that used by climate sceptics, calls for discovering the truths about ‘the real dangers to our world’.

The question of our climatic future is urgent and complex, and in order to further delve into it, we conclude by analyzing a corpus of climate fiction or cli-fi books, which deal with worlds in which the expected disasters have already taken place, and adaptation to climate change is an everyday practice. Moreover, climate fiction is an emerging genre that has gained attention in the media and is characterized as providing new ways to engage with the environmental crisis, for example, by “translating graphs and scientific jargon into experience and emotion” (Tuhus-Dubrow, 2013, np). Coming back to the underlying question of this narrative about the substance of adaptation, we ask: What tropes are picked up in fiction? Who are the protagonists? And, what are they afraid of? To what did they have to adapt?

By examining thematic clusters of words appearing in blurbs of 28 representative cli-fi books we find that human relationships are amongst the most common. For the first time in the analysis words such as ‘wife’, ‘companions’, and ‘family’ occupy a central position in the adaptation discourse, more intimately addressing climate change not only as an environmental but also as a human crisis. And as literary tropes remain close to those basic to the human experience (love, friendship, a quest for home), the underlying question seems to be how these develop in scenarios populated by destroyed metropolises, an unruly nature and new sets of issues.

The occurrence of the words ‘fears’ and ‘death’ confirm the hypothesis that many of these books deal with post-apocalyptic, dystopian or otherwise dark scenarios. The protagonists are scientists facing ethical dilemmas, explorers and survivors of the climatic disasters, animals facing harsh conditions and those who love them. Cities ruined by floods and pollution are the preferred locations for these stories to develop. The narratives put forward by adaptation to climate change and the fiction that develops around it displaces the urgency of the environmental crisis elsewhere. Life goes on, with new sets of urgent issues and problems, with conflicts and new and old types of wars, losers and winners in these scenarios, and the tools of policy, science and humanitarian aid to deal with them.

A final map is produced. The constituent elements captured for each book, including actors, time sets, places, issues, survival strategies, landscapes and personal situation, when available are used to create a new cover for each of the books, as experimental visual summaries of the scenarios they propose.

Digital media provides a rich data set for those studying not only the reception or public understanding of issues such as climate change, but also the substantive formulation and engagement by issue professionals (and, with respect to the cli-fi analysis, by literary authors and those working in the arts). For researchers interested in studying public perception, environmental communication as well as climate change policy, digital media, and in particular the platforms utilized by issue experts as well as the public at large, open up new avenues of analysis, together with the rich sets of data on offer. In our case, studying Twitter, Google and Amazon has allowed us to gain insights into ongoing discussions around climate change adaptation by those engaged in the subject matter, the priorities and levels of engagement of non-governmental organizations as well as the subjects and narratives of best-selling literature, including those in the emerging genre of environmental or climate fiction, aka cli-fi. From Twitter and the work we performed with the websites of non-governmental organizations (through Google searches) we have learned that adaptation is organizing the conversation, especially around the topic of food and that shared fears about our alimentary future and livelihoods are materializing. From the analysis of the media which have taken up the various discourses or approaches to the climate change issue, we found that the news (as opposed to the scientific literature) is increasingly addressing conflict arising warming and other effects. Finally, from the analysis of the best-selling literature and especially the cli-fi titles, the climate change adaptation discourse is widened to capture a more intimate sphere, where not shorelines and vulnerable hotspots are affected, but rather families and people who are now living post climate change. These futures are worthy of study if only to provide more poignancy and immediacy to the issue language.  

Tuhus-Dubrow, R. (2013). “Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre” in Dissent. A Quarterly of Politics and Culture http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cli-fi-birth-of-a-genre

IPCC, 2014: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Field, C.B., V.R. Barros, D.J. Dokken, K.J. Mach, M.D. Mastrandrea, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L. White (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.