Climate Attention Index (CAI)

We construct a climate attention index that measures the extent to which climate change is discussed in the news media. Our method focuses on major newspapers with a significant presence on Twitter across many countries. This approach has allowed us to compile nearly 24 million tweets, which we then aggregate at the country level across daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly frequencies. We compare the aggregated text to a corpus of authoritative texts on climate change, similar to the method used by Engle et al. (2019). As of the date of this draft, our data coverage refers to a total of 25 countries that span a wide range of local languages, income levels, and geographical regions. Sample period from October 2014 to December 2022.

Our data is publicly available.