The #ClimateWeek2019 from the pandemic point of view

Earth is breathing.

The Earth is breathing a sigh of relief with the drop in air pollution. This is the only good news related to the global spread of the Coronavirus.

A new analysis, released by the BBC and conducted by researchers from Columbia University of New York (credits: Grennme) has revealed that air pollution levels drop in areas of the world where there is a bigger spread of coronavirus: from China to Northern Italy.

Data speak loud and clear (and we blindly believe in the data): with the restrictions on the movement of people and transport introduced to combat the spread of Covid-19, the pollution in the atmosphere has definitely reduced.

Satellite photos of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) show that Italy has lost much of its gray coat, made of fine dust, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. (photo credit: meteogiornale)

A tragicomic situation. In a difficult moment for humanity, the environment is resuming its revenge, advancing there where man is no longer allowed to go, recovering the atmosphere and allowing animals to get closer to cities.

A completely different situation, thinking about what was happening just a few months ago.

In September there was the Climate Action Week, during the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York. From 20th to 27th of  September, people gathered on the streets all over the world. Peaceful demonstrations, especially of young people, who asked for the possibility of a better future on this planet.

The young activist Greta Thunberg was the real protagonist, inciting students during the Fridays For future, global strikes in which students from all over the world took to the streets to demonstrate.

A very important moment for the fate of the planet, but a main public event, useful to monitor on social networks and web.

In this way, through our AI technologies and the Digital Consumer Intelligence platform, we asked to data: which topics have been the most debated? Who were the top mentioned political figures? How did Greta involve her audience?

How we face climate change and try to solve it is a fundamental issue of our time. But it is also important to understand the way we talk about it, both offline and online.

Online conversations are often catalyzed by great world events such as the New York UN Climate Summit and Fridays For Future Global Climate Strike.

So, the #ClimateWeek became an opportunity to detect the different ways we react online to the climate emergency and to find out the hot topics of Twitter’s debate.

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A polarization between the United Nation meeting on Climate Change and President Donald Trump dominated Twitter’s stage, creating two big clusters of conversations rotating around two topics: the future of young generations and CO2 emissions due to fossil fuel extraction.

The influence of Greta Thunberg’s speech to world leaders at the Crystal Palace was huge on social media. Because of her, Twitter was flooded by a great wave of joy and admiration capable of reducing significantly the usual trends of disapproval generated by such controversial topics.

The positive sentiment that surrounded the students’ strikes is there to confirm that people want to talk about the climate emergency in new ways.

The #CoveringClimateNow initiative tried to do so by bringing climate change-related news to the headlines of the most popular newspapers in the world.

Pending the evolution and changes of the world scenario, we can see that, despite the period of crisis, the climate change topic is always on fire on the web. So we can just have a question: What will the next tweet be?