MIT Portugal Seed Grant Report

Understanding the climatic impacts on society and people’s subjective well-being is crucial for developing mitigation and adaptation strategies. However, insufficient research has been conducted to quantify the climatic impacts on expressed sentiment in Portugal. We will use millions of geotagged tweets from Twitter in Portugal, coupled with the meteorological conditions people face when posting, to explore: (1) Portuguese’s beliefs in Climate Change: Whether and how do people in Portugal communicate on social media about Climate Change? (2) Climate Change’s social consequences in Portugal. What are the effects of Climate Change and related natural disasters (such as drought, heatwaves, and wildfires) on human psychology? (3) Climate Change and behavioral changes in Portugal. How do mitigation and adaptation ideas, actions and policies spread on social media? We will develop a novel analytical approach by combining environmental data and social media data, and employing methodologies from computer science, climate studies, and psychological research.

Project report: 2020-2022 Project Report