Keynote Speaker

The workshop will host a keynote by Max Falkenberg (City, University of London)

Max Falkenberg is a physicist and computational social scientist based at City, University of London, and a visiting Fellow in the Institute for Sustainable Resources at UCL. He completed his PhD in the Physics of Complex Systems at Imperial College London in 2022. From October 2024, he will be an EU funded Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Network and Data Science at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria. Max’s research focuses on computational social science with a particular interest in the structural underpinning of political polarization and how climate change is communicated online.

Keynote Abstract: a rapidly changing climate poses systemic risks to global societies and has been implicated in worsening climate disasters including hurricanes, floods and wildfires. However, despite broad scientific consensus as to the causes of climate change, there remains a lack of consensus as to the policies needed to tackle climate change in a fair and equitable manner. To address this lack of consensus, it is critical that we understand how climate change is communicated and identify the cleavages across which societies are polarized on climate action. In this talk, I will discuss recent projects on the evolution of climate communication online, studying the international climate conferences COP and investigating how the public attribute hurricanes to climate change. As part of this, I will show how network methods can be used to combine structural insights with narrative context to identify perception gaps in climate communication. Finally, I will comment on some of the open questions in climate communication and will discuss why, in my opinion, the scientific community must take greater care in how it communicates climate change to social groups who do not already support the need for rapid action.