Talking Climate Change via Social Media: Communication, Engagement and Behaviour

"Aiming to raise awareness, and to promote behaviour change, governments and organisations are conducting multiple pro-environmental campaigns, particularly via social media. However, to the best of our knowledge, these campaigns are neither based on, nor do they take advantage of, the existing theories and studies of behaviour change, to better target and inform users."

This paper proposes an approach for analysing user behaviour towards climate change based on the 5 Doors Theory of behaviour change. Identifying 5 behavioural stages in which users are based on their social media contributions, the paper applies this approach to analyse the online behaviour of participants of the Earth Hour 2015 (EH2015) and United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) Twitter movements. Results of this analysis are used to provide guidelines on how to improve communication via these campaigns.

The authors suggest that, despite the clear implications of individual and household consumption on climate change and the urgent need for a societal response to the problem, public engagement is currently limited. Many people do not appreciate the correlation between their individual behaviour and its global impact, underestimating their power to influence climate change. Several campaigns and initiatives have emerged in the last few years with the aim of involving individuals closely in the solution. One of the core mediums they use to communicate with the public worldwide are social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

For example, Earth Hour is a large-scale campaign launched by the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) every year to raise awareness about environmental issues. The event aims to encourage individuals, communities, households, and businesses to turn off their lights for one hour, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., on a specified evening towards the end of March as a symbol for their commitment to the planet. It has grown to engage more than 172 countries worldwide. Multiple organisations, including WWF, launched social media campaigns around COP21, held in Paris, France, in December 2015, generating a large worldwide social media reaction.

The authors next take a look at theoretical studies to get insights on which communication strategies have been proposed to influence people's behaviour in favour of a product or idea. To have impact, the first thing a campaign needs is to have a clear story to tell, with a very concrete action connected to it. This is particularly complex in the case of campaigns around climate change, since it is a very broad subject that represents many different smaller stories, connected to multiple behavioural actions. Campaigners should therefore be able to break down those stories and actions for the public. Climate change campaigners should focus on creating innovative, useful messages with an emotional undertone and a memorable storyline. Works like Campbell, Kazakova, and Cheong have focused on analysing the characteristics of the climate change social media campaigns, including previous editions of EH, and the mechanisms used to engage with the public during these campaigns. The work of Fernandez complements these by studying the effect of some of those mechanisms and their impact on public engagement. This study concludes that, in the context of these campaigns, more engaging posts tend to be slightly longer (in the case of Twitter, they use nearly all 140 characters available), are easier to read, have positive sentiment, and have media items (original/funny photos linked to the message) associated with them. Also, symbolism needs to be focused around climate-change-related topics. Superheroes, celebrities, and other types of symbols that are sometimes associated with these social media campaigns create buzz but do not generate awareness or engagement towards climate change.

Environmental campaigns not only aim to raise awareness and create engagement, but ideally also to trigger behavioural changes - for instance by encouraging individuals to reduce their consumption of energy. Robinson developed the 5 Doors theory, which aggregates elements from Diffusion of Innovations and the Self-Determination theory of motivation, among others. Instead of promoting changes to people's beliefs or attitudes, the 5 Doors theory focuses more on "enabling relationships between people and modifying technological and social contexts". The theory consists of 5 conditions that must be present in a cycle of behaviour change (see Figure 1, above). When mapping this theory to analyse user behaviour, the authors' interpretation is that each of these conditions maps to a different behavioural stage - the assumption being that users shape their social media messages differently according to the stage in which they are at. The conditions are, in short: (i) desirability - people in this stage are motivated (desire) to reduce their frustrations (e.g., high expense on their electricity bill); (ii) anabling context - people in this stage are changing their environment (e.g., social norms) to enable a new behaviour; (iii) can do - people in this stage are already acting; (iv) positive buzz - people in this stage communicate their experiences and success stories; and (v) invitation - people in this stage invite and engage other people to their cause, perhaps by authentically modelling the change in their own lives. Since intervention strategies or tactics to nudge the user in the direction of change are generally different according to the stage in which the user is, it is important for campaigners to: (i) identify the different behavioural stages of their audiences and (ii) make sure that a campaign is covering all possible stages so that all users find support to progress.

Intervention strategies can be used alone or combined to promote or influence a behaviour change. They are explored here and include: information, discussions, public commitment, feedback (by campaign organisers), social feedback (peer to peer), goal-setting, collaboration, competition, rewards, incentives, and personalisation. Barriers to change can involve: (i) friction - the social media sender needs to reduce resistance as much as possible by giving the user tips and advice; (ii) the pain of acting now overshadows delayed benefits - communication strategies need to highlight how a person's actions really matter; (iii) people don't think about the benefits at the right time - work on communicating the benefits clearly and recurrently; and (iv) people do not believe that climate change is real - find other benefits to tie to the desired behaviour, though this strategy does not tend to be long-lasting.

Having acquired an understanding of how different behavioural stages are communicated, the authors developed an approach for automatically identifying the behavioural stage of users, based on 3 main steps: (i) a manual inspection of the user-generated content (Twitter data) to identify how different behavioural stages are reflected in terms of linguistic patterns (Section 4.2); (ii) a feature engineering process, in which the previously identified linguistic patterns are transformed into numerical, categorical, and semantic features, which can be automatically extracted and processed (Section 4.3); and (iii) the construction of supervised classification models which aim to categorise users into different behavioural stages based on the features extracted from their generated content (Section 4.4). In Section 5, they then describe the experiments conducted to analyse the behaviour of the participants of the EH2015 and COP21 social media movements, following the proposed approach. In particular, they take into account monthly behaviour before, during and after the days in which EH2015 and COP21 were celebrated.

Their results show that most of the social media participants are at the desirability stage. There is something they want to change but they do not know how. A big part of a campaign's effort should therefore be concentrated on providing messages with very concrete suggestions on climate change actions. There are very few users in the invitation stage, and most of them are organisations. "It is our recommendation to identify...really engaged individuals and community leaders and involve them more closely in the campaigns, invite them to share their stories, and provide feedback, so that they can inspire others." Communication in their collected data generally functions as broadcasting, or one-way communication, from the organisations to the public. However, frequent and focused feedback is an intervention strategy that can help build self-efficacy and nudge the users in the can do and buzz stages in the direction of change. "Our recommendation for campaigners is therefore to dedicate efforts towards engaging in discussions and providing direct feedback to users."

The authors concede that social media behaviour is not exactly the same as behaviour in the physical world. People do not report everything they do and how they do it via social media. While the results of a questionnaire they conducted (see Section 4.1) indicate an association between behavioural stages and different types of communication, their learnings about users' behaviour from their generated content may be only a partial reflection of the reality.

The authors conclude: "Engaging people with climate change by using social media as a medium not only requires the understanding of how social media communication can drive engagement and behaviour change, but also requires the understanding of the needs and situations of the users so that more targeted strategies can be selected to drive such change."