Summary

As climate change is becoming an ever more pressing global policy challenge, the linkages of climate change to other issue areas are diversifying. This article by Lisa Dellmuth and Karina Shyrokykh from Stockholm University, seeks to explain why some climate linkages are more likely to spread across international organizations than others – such as climate-health, climate-development, or climate-security.

The article is published by the scientific journal Earth System Governance.

Three framings of climate change

Distinguishing between three framings of climate change – technical, emotional and emergency – the researchers have developed and tested novel hypotheses about the effects of framing climate linkages on their spread on social media. The researchers have used an original dataset on the dissemination of climate linkages on the social media platform Twitter (currently X) among eight IOs with a global mandate during the period 2008–2019.

Key messages

• Drawing on organizational and framing theories, the authors argue that the framing of climate linkages affects how such linkages disseminate across international organizations.
• The authors have studied several linkages’ spread across United Nations agencies on social media, and has found that only in the context of the climate-development and climate-disaster risks linkages, that technical and emotional framings affect how linkages spread across United Nations agencies.