Climate change adaptation on the (social) media agenda, political agenda and policy agenda in the Netherlands and the UK: an NLP analysis

Climate change adaptation policy comes about in a dynamic playing field where policy, politics, traditional media, and social media interact. More insight into how attention for climate change adaptation develops over time in policy decisions, political debates, media stories, and social media platforms is critical for a better understanding of when and how climate action happens or fails to happen. In this study, we focus on the agenda-setting process for climate change adaptation over the past decade in the Netherlands and the UK. Existing research shows that agenda-setting interrelationships exist between media and politics, both in the amount of attention for issues and in the way they are framed, but the size and direction of these relationships differ across (sub-)issues and contexts. To better understand how climate change adaptation travels across different agendas, we track the discussion on climate change adaptation on (social) media agenda, the political agenda and the policy agenda. We analyse and compare these dynamics in two countries, the Netherlands and the UK, which differ in the presence and nature of climate change impacts and adaptation actions. We use datasets obtained from the Twitter API to map the social media agenda, and datasets from national news sources for the media agenda. Datasets of parliamentary debates and questions provide insight into the political agenda for climate change adaptation, and policy documents on climate change adaptation were downloaded from government websites to capture the policy agenda. We make use of data-driven methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP), including word vectorization and topic modeling, to map and compare climate change adaptation across the different agendas.