The Journal of Brief Ideas

By Lesandro Ponciano

Climate change is a worldwide problem felt locally in municipalities. Mitigation and adaptation climate actions are carried out by many entities [1]. Multi-level governance articulates local, state and national government authorities [2], while network governance embraces international and non-government actors. Social activities are performed seeking citizen awareness and participation. Despite showing how citizens perceive, experience and react to climate change, field and social media studies still need to improve in framing multilevel/network actions and measuring long-term engagement. Social Presence [3] and Human Engagement [4] theoretical frameworks should be combined in a longitudinal research effort to investigate how actions are designed and how citizens react to them. Theory-driven data analysis can uncover social presence styles, citizen engagement patterns [5] and human aspects [6] across levels and network nodes. Public datasets on fine-grained multilevel actions and long-term engagement can be made up by integrating meteorological, warning and sociotechnical systems maintained by the government and non-government entities. Longitudinal research can deepen our understanding of events and actions beyond a single occurrence, reconstructing the long-term chain of actions, structures of social presence, and dynamics of behavioural and cognitive factors (e.g., climate anxiety and normalisation effect). We are implementing an instance of this idea in Brazil.

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