CGIAR's dashboards provide a snapshot of global food and climate security

When Greta Thunberg was arrested in January 2023 for protesting the expansion of a coal mine into the village of Lützerath, Germany, she shared a post on X using the hashtag “ClimateJustice.” The post received high levels of engagement, with hundreds of thousands of likes, retweets and replies. Related discussions on the platform used the hashtag in ways that extended beyond the traditional meaning of climate justice, tying it to Thunberg’s arrest and other instances of climate activism. This highlights how conversations on social media can evolve and shift context, says Bia Carneiro, co-lead of the digital innovations thematic area of CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security. CGIAR is a global research-for-development partnership focused on food, land, and water systems.

Carneiro says conversations about climate justice in the news media, at that time, revolved around the conventional definition of climate justice, which focuses on the unequal or disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized or vulnerable populations.

She explains that social media can often capture “citizen-level” or “grassroots” conversations, and news media depicts a more “traditional discourse,” where more mainstream actors are heard. A downside to looking solely at social media, however, is the amount of “noise,” says Carneiro, referring to how words and phrases can suddenly go viral, whereas news media remains more stable.

CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security is leveraging these dual streams of conversation- on news media and social media- to produce research and create tools that can aid actors in related policy and programming. They have created two projects to do this: the Climate Security Dialogues Dashboard and a USAID-funded project, “Supporting Food Insecurity Early Warning through Digital Media” for the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). The Climate Security Dialogues dashboard is publicly available and provides a visual, detailed snapshot of conversations around climate, peace and security, and the latter project aims to support FEWS NET’s food security analyses. 

Methodology

The Climate Security Dialogues Dashboard features information from three sources: X data from 2014 until May 2023, when X’s academic API was shut down; data from public Telegram groups and channels; and news media from Media Cloud data.

Using Media Cloud’s collections that source news stories from primarily English-speaking countries around the world, frequently mentioned institutions, locations and emerging and popular terms in news articles are identified with a Media Cloud algorithm.  Carneiro emphasizes that one of Media Cloud’s greatest advantages is the ability to zoom in and focus on coverage in specific geographies of interest by selecting certain country collections, as well as, in the case of the dashboard, zoom out by joining different collections for comprehensive coverage. 

The FEWS NET project also involved collecting information from three components: Telegram, to understand conversations on social media; Google Trends to gauge levels of attention; and Media Cloud to monitor news media. Articles are pulled in from 45 countries, using Media Cloud’s national collections. A text-mining algorithm is applied to determine whether each story relates to FEWS NET’s dimensions of food security, such as shocks (climate, conflict, markets, disease, etc) and outcomes (health, nutrition and livelihood impacts).

The goal is to identify any potential food security concerns. Carneiro explains that GCIAR’s tool provides a new layer of insights that emerge from news stories and digital platforms. This supports FEWS NET’s food insecurity early warning system, which informs humanitarian planning and response by the U.S. government and several other organizations, she says.

The final product was a dashboard that provides comparative and country-focused insights into news, social media and search interest. “We have handed the tool over to FEWS NET for integration into their data infrastructure and will support capacity building efforts to integrate digital platform insights into the periodic analysis”, Carneiro says.