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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

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Agenda

• Introduction• Data and Methodology• Preliminary results• Conclusion and discussion

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Introduction: Salience of climate change• Largest GHG emitter

19170

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2000

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China’s GHG Emission Industrial Emitters in China

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Introduction: Salience of climate change• Vulnerability of natural system and social-economic system

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 20100

10000

20000

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60000

70000

Total damage area (1k ha.) Power (Total damage area (1k ha.))Flood area (1k ha.) Drought area (1k ha.)

21 July Rainstorm in Beijing Damage areas by flood & drought in China

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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 Xie Zhenhua in charge of climate change issue working with BRICS

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IntroductionPromoting

and recommending phase

Prescribing phase

Invoking phase

Application phase

Intelligence phase

Appraisal phase

Terminating phase

Harold D. Lasswell, 1963

Which issue to attend to?

Which attributes to incorporate?

Which solution to examine?

Which alternative to

select?

Issue A Issue B Issue C Issue K

Attribute I Attribute II Attribute G

Alternative 1 Alternative 2 Alternative 3

Choice

Attention Allocation

Problem Characterization

Alternative Generation

Choice

Agenda Setting

Problem Definition

Proposal and Debate

Collective Choice

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Introduction: importance of issue framing

Policy Problem

Issue Framing Decision Making

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Introduction

Climate change

National Security

Energy Strategy

Poverty Eradication

Gender Equality

International Politics

Disaster reduction

……

Science disputes

Policy disputes

Multiple attributes and dimensions of climate change issue

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Introduction

• Research Question:

• How climate change issue has been framed in China’s policy discourse?

• Climate change issue framing and issue evolution in China

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Data and methodology

• Data source: People’s Daily

Sample selection criteria: all articles mentioning climate change explicitly.Sample size: 4229 articles from 1947 to 2013

Why People’s Daily: official and authoritative newspaper of the government of China and Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Data and methodology

19471949

19511953

19551957

19591961

19631965

19671969

19711973

19751977

19791981

19831985

19871989

19911993

19951997

19992001

20032005

20072009

20112013

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

1 0 2 4 2 8 12 19 15 11 19 21 3246 43

10 16 10 14 6 2 3 13 14 24 20 3114 8 1 11 9 9 17 10 10 8 12 15 16 13

26 31 30 4154

20 30 35 27 36 38 36 4356

73 62

22

62

103

415

346

518

578

452

276267

Climate change: change of weather Climate change: global warming

Milestone: 1977.3.30 Discussion on the climate change of the world

Three years of natural disasters around 1960s Endorsement of UNFCCC

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Data and methodology

• Content analysis

Text VariableCause

Effect

Stable Relationship

Judging and Coding Categorizing and Numbering

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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

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Data and methodologyKeyword

Weighed Score

20 keywords with scores indicating the significance for every article.

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Data and methodology

关系 观测 进展 地面 北冰洋 配合 南部 接收 煤层气 日元 胃病 光子 生产力 趋于 湘玲文 牡丹 史培军签约国 远东 拉加德 仁武 宗岳 中坦 合营期二十二 功臣 宜居0

20000

40000

60000

80000

100000

120000

140000

发展 中方 森林 自然 解决 公社 政治 小麦 公路 要求墨西哥长江习近平时期0

20000

40000

60000

80000

100000

120000

140000

发展 农业 和平 创新 林业 草原 小麦 成员国 航空 牲畜 荒漠化 建筑0

20000

40000

60000

80000

100000

120000

140000

All the keywords with the sum of scores in all the articles

Top 500 high scores words Code dictionary extracted from top 500 words

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Data and methodologyDevelopmentdiplomacyClimate changeEconomyEnvironmentEnergySocietyScience & TechnologyEcologyResearchResourceAgricultureMeteorologySafetyGHGFoodPoliticsForestryReformInvestmentIndustryEngineeringInnovationUrbanRuralBiologyCultureEducationDisasterSustainabilityDisaster MitigationTransportationPovertyPublic HealthMilitaryConstruction

Keyword 1

Keyword 2

Keyword 3

Keyword …

Check the meaning by human coder Tagged with a topic label

36 topics

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Data and methodology

Factor 1 Factor2 … Factor #j

Article #1 Score11 … … Score1j

Article #2 … … … …

… … … … …

Article #i Scorei1 … … Scoreij

Data Matrix

150 of 4229 (about 3.5% of all) articles have no tags indicating its topic dimension.

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Preliminary results

19471949

19511953

19551957

19591961

19631965

19671969

19711973

19751977

19791981

19831985

19871989

19911993

19951997

19992001

20032005

20072009

20112013

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

Agriculture Biology Climate change Construction Culture Development Diploma DisasterDisaster Mitigation Ecology Economy Education Energy Engineering Environment FoodForestry GHG Industry Innovation Investment Meteorology Military PoliticsPoverty Public Health Reform Research Resource Rural S&T SafetySociety Sustainability Transportation Urban

Climate change: change of weather Climate change: global warming

Milestone: 1977.3.30 Discussion on the climate change of the world

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Preliminary results

　 Agriculture Disaster DisasterMitigation Economy Environment Industry Meteorology Research Resource SampT Safety Transportati

on

Climate change

Pearson Correlation .592** .765** .522** .770** .698** .480** .658** .737** .511** .497** .371* .630**

Sig. (2-tailed) .001 .000 .003 .000 .000 .007 .000 .000 .004 .005 .043 .000

1947-1977

　 Development diplomacy Ecology Economy Energy Environmen

t Forestry GHG Meteorology Politics Research Resource Society

Climate change

Pearson Correlation .594* .502* .729** .843** .678** .893** .745** .914** .758** .708** .611* .689** .790**

Sig. (2-tailed) .015 .047 .001 .000 .004 .000 .001 .000 .001 .002 .012 .003 .000

1977-1992

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Preliminary results

1992-2013

　 Agriculture Construction Culture Development diplomacy DisasterMitig

ation Ecology Economy Education Energy Engineering Environment

Climatechange

Pearson Correlation .529* .519* .673** .696** .766** .730** .512* .682** .477* .867** .443* .844**

Sig. (2-tailed) .011 .013 .001 .000 .000 .000 .015 .000 .025 .000 .039 .000

Food Forestry GHG Industry Innovation Investment Meteorology Politics PublicHeal

th Reform Research Resource Rural SampT Safety Society Transportation

.494* .442* .945** .497* .564** .623** .684** .798** .576** .579** .647** .568** .437* .749** .730** .729** .551**

.020 .039 .000 .019 .006 .002 .000 .000 .005 .005 .001 .006 .042 .000 .000 .000 .008

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Preliminary results

19471950

19531956

19591962

19651968

19711974

19771980

19831986

19891992

19951998

20012004

20072010

20130

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10000

15000

20000

25000

Weighed_Score Unweighed_Score Difference

Weighted score of climate change by year Difference of unweighted and weighted score of climate change

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Preliminary results

19771979

19811983

19851987

19891991

19931995

19971999

20012003

20052007

20092011

20130

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

Ratio 1977-2013

19921993

19941995

19961997

19981999

20002001

20022003

20042005

20062007

20082009

20102011

20122013

0

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

Ratio 1992-2013

Climate change is covered more and more by other issues. The salience of climate change is being taken advantage of by others.

1977-2013

1992-2013

Define ratio=score of climate change/sum of scores of all factors

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Thank youShiwei 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

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