Background:

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges for humanity. The manifold climate impacts on public health have received growing attention over the last years in the domains of research, adaptation and mitigation measures, as well as media coverage. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are already leading causes of death worldwide, and climate change will further exacerbate health burden, e.g. in terms of heat-related mortality, climate anxiety, and other topics. The media plays an important role in communicating climate change-related health risks, conveying scientific findings and political positions to the general public. From a public health perspective, it is important to follow the public discourse on climate topics in order to better understand the perception of related health risks. So far, various studies have analyzed media coverage of climate change in different countries around the world. However, research has only rarely focused on public health issues and without considering the potential of climate change-related health risks in the analyzed regions.

Aim/s:

By combining data from current climate and health research as well as media data, the project aims to analyze the media discourse from a public health-centric perspective, allowing to compare the representation of health issues between regions with similar, respectively, different risk exposure to climate change. A special focus will be given to NCDs.

AI methods:

The analysis of the media discourse, e.g., through the analysis of news articles, will make use of methods from natural language processing (e.g. text clustering, semantics, sentiment analysis). The project offers opportunities for developing methods in multi-modal data combination and text analysis.

Keywords:

Public health, climate, NCDs, natural language processing