Issue framing and evolving of climate change in China

1. Issue framing and evolving of climate change in China Shiwei FAN*, Jianhua XU**, Lan XUE*, Cheng LUO*** * School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University **Dept of Environmental Management, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University *** Dept. of Computer Science & Technology ,Tsinghua University

2. Agenda • Introduction • Data and Methodology • Preliminary results • Conclusion and discussion

3. Introduction: Salience of climate change • Largest GHG emitter China’s GHG Emission Industrial Emitters in China

4. Introduction: Salience of climate change • Vulnerability of natural system and social-economic system 21 July Rainstorm in Beijing Damage areas by flood & drought in China

5. Introduction: Salience of climate change • Consensus on addressing climate change risk through collective action President Hu Jintao making speech in UN climate conference Deputy director of NRDC XieZhenhua in charge of climate change issue working with BRICS

6. Introduction Which issue to attend to? Attention Allocation Agenda Setting Issue A Issue C Issue K Issue B Which attributes to incorporate? Problem Characterization Problem Definition Attribute I Attribute II Attribute G Which solution to examine? Alternative Generation Proposal and Debate Alternative 1 Alternative 2 Alternative 3 Which alternative to select? Choice Choice Collective Choice Harold D. Lasswell, 1963

7. Introduction: importance of issue framing Issue Framing Decision Making Policy Problem

8. Introduction Multiple attributes and dimensions of climate change issue National Security Energy Strategy Science disputes Climate change Poverty Eradication …… Gender Equality Policy disputes International Politics Disaster reduction

9. Introduction • Research Question: • How climate change issue has been framed in China’s policy discourse? • Climate change issue framing and issue evolution in China

10. Data and methodology • Data source: People’s Daily Why People’s Daily: official and authoritative newspaper of the government of China and Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Sample selection criteria: all articles mentioning climate change explicitly. Sample size: 4229 articles from 1947 to 2013

11. Data and methodology Milestone: 1977.3.30 Discussion on the climate change of the world Climate change: change of weather Climate change: global warming Three years of natural disasters around 1960s Endorsement of UNFCCC

12. Data and methodology • Content analysis Variable Text Cause Stable Relationship Judging and Coding Categorizing and Numbering Effect

13. Data and methodology • Technique: Natural Language Processing (NLP) • TextRank for keyword extraction Weighted graphs with the scores of the vertex R. Mihalcea and P. Tarau. Textrank: Bringing order into texts. In Proceedings of EMNLP, volume 4, pages 404–411. Barcelona: ACL, 2004

14. Data and methodology Keyword Weighed Score 20 keywords with scores indicating the significance for every article.

15. Data and methodology Code dictionary extracted from top 500 words Top 500 high scores words All the keywords with the sum of scores in all the articles

16. 36 topics Data and methodology Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Check the meaning by human coder Tagged with a topic label Keyword 3 Keyword …

17. Data and methodology Data Matrix 150 of 4229 (about 3.5% of all) articles have no tags indicating its topic dimension.

18. Preliminary results Milestone: 1977.3.30 Discussion on the climate change of the world Climate change: change of weather Climate change: global warming

19. Preliminary results 1947-1977 1977-1992

20. Preliminary results 1992-2013

21. Preliminary results Weighted score of climate change by year Difference of unweighted and weighted score of climate change

22. Preliminary results Define ratio=score of climate change/sum of scores of all factors 1977-2013 1992-2013 Climate change is covered more and more by other issues. The salience of climate change is being taken advantage of by others.

23. Conclusion and discussion • Major findings • 1. the shift in the issue implication of “climate change”. • 2. Evolving of framing: • 1947-1977: low concern on climate change and other related issue • 1977-1992: dominance of environment and climate change on issues relating to climate change • 1992-2013: rapid and explosive increase in the attention to climate change, but a changing paradigm in understanding climate change issue • 3. More policy subsystems draw attention to climate change issue while it seems that the salience of climate change is being used.

24. Conclusion and discussion • Implications to policy process • Prevent the issue attention cycle from fading for the chronic risk issue of climate change need continuous attentions from policy makers. • It’s indispensable to involve different agencies and sectors to address climate change together, because the climate change issue is not only a natural and environmental issue, but also a social and economic issue. • Though several policy subsystems tend to attach their preferred issues and solutions to climate change, a strong will of addressing climate change from the top-level decision makers is necessary; China needs a top-down strategy or roadmap and a stronger government sector in climate change issue so as to make climate change “cover” and lead others, which can generate better governance.

25. Conclusion and discussion • To improve the research validity • 1. data: better way to detect what the policy makers are thinking about? • 2. unsupervised learning technique: is it valid? • 3. the research process: is the human coder reliable and credible?

26. Thank you Shiwei FAN*, Jianhua XU**, Lan XUE*, Cheng LUO*** * School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University **Dept of Environmental Management, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University *** Dept. of Computer Science & Technology ,Tsinghua University