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Extreme events and climate change. How did wildfires and other stress events affect the social and policy aspects of the energy transition? A machine learning mass media article analysis.

par Varelas, Panagiotis ;Contino, Francesco;Parente, Alessandro
Référence ECOS 2022 35th International Conference on Efficiency, Cost, Optimization, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy Systems(3-7 July 2022: Copenhagen, Denmark), Proceedings of ECOS 2022: The 35th International Conference on Efficiency, Cost, Optimization, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy Systems., Vol. 35, page (1497)
Publication Publié, 2022

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Résumé :

Extreme events that unfolded in 2021 because of the intense weather conditions around the globe are a strong reminder that climate change is happening now. Wildfires in south Europe and California floods in west Europe, and hurricane Ida, are only a glimpse of our near future. According to the latest pledges from COP26 in Glasgow, the optimistic scenario is to keep the temperature increase of the planet around 2.1°C degrees, far from Paris Agreement and any other international agreement goals. Besides the environmental impacts, these stress events could potentially have economical and societal consequences. How are citizens and their acceptance of alternative technologies affected by them? What is the reaction from the mass media? How can uncertainty arising from these events potentially affect investments in renewable energy? Analyzing articles from mass media by applying web-scrapping and Natural Language Processing (NLP), we searched for a possible association between disasters and acceptance of alternative technologies. Based on our findings, stress events have a positive relation to the acceptance of new technologies, such as wildfires in southern Europe and floods in Germany and Belgium. Our results can serve as a guideline to policymakers for better and more accurate decision-making, to identify when and how new policies should be introduced to the public. We anticipate further extending our methods with additional machine learning algorithms and quantifying the acceptance of specific technologies. Finally, additional stress events not related to weather conditions can be included such as elections, ratification of policy acts, and international meeting agreements.