What is climate change?

Climate change refers to long-term changes in temperatures and weather patterns. While there are natural shifts, human activity, through burning fossil fuels, have had a tremendous effect on causing climate change. It takes a lot of energy to heat energy to raise Earth’s surface temperature, yet since pre-industrial times there has been an increase of about 1 degrees Celsius.

What are the consequences of climate change?

An increase in Earth’s yearly average temperature can have disastrous effects on humanity. As The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2022 summarise, climate change is “humanity’s”code red” warning” that has an impact on other sustainable development goals (SDG). For example, an increase in the frequency of natural disasters and extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, will have a direct impact on food production leading to increased food insecurity. While climate change affects everyone, the already vulnerable populations (e.g. Central and South America) tend to be affected the most. Indeed, the research suggests that “climate-driven economic downturns” might increase the risk for conflict, especially in countries that depend on agriculture. As a result, this is likely to further perpetuate socioeconomic inequalities across populations and prevent the actualisation of the SDG goals.

The image has been borrowed from the UN website: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal13

How do people think about climate change?

Given the disastrous effects of climate change on humanity, it is not surprising that the the majority of people believe in climate change as a global emergency, even though there are regional variations. Indeed, experience of extreme weather events has been linked to changes in climate change attitudes and behaviours and personal concern for climate change have been associated with support for climate action and intervention.

Where does our project sit?

Human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, has significantly contributed to climate change. It has a negative impact on society through increased frequencies of climate-related natural disasters, such as drought or flood. Through exploratory data analysis we aim to examine the relationships between human activity and natural disasters. For example, is there a direct relationship between CO2 omissions and climate-related natural disasters? Is here a relationship between CO2 emissions and land temperature? What about CO2 emissions and renewable energy? An in-depth examination of such questions is beyond the scope of this project yet, exploratory data analysis (EDA), can support theory-generation that, then, might reveal causal relationships of the effects of climate change on society.

Support for climate action has also been associated with a personal perception of its consequences. Therefore, we are tried to examine the connection between personal belief in climate action, socioeconomic characteristics, and climate data. For instance, we asked if people with lower level of education prioritise economic growth because, likely, their income is lower compared to those who are more formally educated. Finally, we also tried to develop a model to predict support to climate action over economic growth in the hopes to better understand underlying causal mechanism.