Despite countries’ climate pledges and the economic downturn triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to rise at record levels. At COP21 in 2015, the Paris Agreement succeeded in setting a temperature increase reduction target: countries committed to limiting global temperature rises to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. States had to provide Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to explain how they were going to contribute to achieving the 1.5°C target, and how they were planning to adapt to ensure that people and assets are protected from the consequences of climate change.

In the upcoming Conference of the Parties (COP26), which will be hosted in Glasgow, Scotland, countries will gather to revise their progress and to determine which actions will be necessary to respect the Paris target. COP26 comes after further warnings from the scientific community: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred” (IPCC, 2021)).

Key themes at this COP will include mitigation (i.e. reduction of the GHG emissions), adaptation (i.e. adjustment to current and future changes) and loss and damage (i.e. compensation of current and future losses exceeding the adaptive capacity of countries). Progress towards a climate-neutral future is more needed than ever.

To learn more about COP26, the Paris Agreement, and the need for action on climate change, the following links may be of interest:

• Official COP26 Website
• Climate Change FAQs

About this dashboard

This dashboard uses data from Twitter to track the online discussion regarding COP26. By considering all publicly available tweets since June 1st, 2021 using the keyword term “cop26”, we investigate how users interact, the communities formed by user interactions, key themes in the hashtags used by ideologically opposed groups, COP26 related hashtags which are trending, and the global distribution of Twitter users engaged in the COP26 discussion.

Disclaimer

All data downloaded for this project was extracted using the Twitter API for Academic Research. In accordance with the terms of the Twitter API, we only display publically accessible information and have not matched any user data to user profiles outside of Twitter.

Algorithms used to rank user importance, to group users in communities, and to split users based on ideology, are all automated using standard techniques from network science - small changes in parameter algorithms can change results. The values and groupings shown should be understood as imprecise measures and not exact values. Please also note that user importance and groupings are determined based on tweets related to COP26 only, and not on any other topic on Twitter elsewhere.

For privacy reasons, we do not label the communities, choosing to display community grouping in an unaltered manner.

Please remember that Twitter is not an unbiased social media platform, and that the data extracted is often not a fair representation of opinions and interactions in the wider population.