The role of science in the climate change discussions on Reddit

The role of science in the climate change discussions on Reddit. PLOS Climate, 4(5), p.e0000541.

Cornale, P., Tizzani, M., Ciulla, F., Kalimeri, K., Omodei, E., Paolotti, D. and Mejova, Y.,

Well-informed collective and individual action necessary to address climate change hinges on the public’s understanding of the relevant scientific findings. In this study, we examine the use of scientific sources in the course of 14 years of public deliberation around climate change on one of the largest social media platforms, Reddit. We find that only 4.0% of the links in the Reddit posts, and 6.5% in the comments, point to domains of scientific sources, although these rates have been increasing in the past decades. Scientific sources are not often used in response to links to unreliable sources, instead, other such sources are likely to appear in their comments. This study provides the quantitative evidence of the dearth of scientific basis of the online public debate and puts it in the context of other, potentially unreliable, sources of information.

FOOD-RELATED CONFLICT & FOOD INSECURITY

“Impact of Food-related Conflicts on Self-reported Food Insecurity”. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, section Land, Livelihoods and Food Security, 2023

Fiandrino S, Dowd C, Martini G, Mejova Y, Omodei E, Paolotti D, Tizzani M

Among the many causes of food crises, violent conflict, economic shocks, and environmental pressures are the most influential. In this work, we focus primarily on the conflict-related domain. Finding a stable relationship between conflict and food insecurity is complex for several reasons: first, the relationship is mutually reinforcing; second, the full impact of conflict on food insecurity may take time to have an effect; and third, conflict itself is a multidimensional phenomenon and can include multiple types of violent events. This research set out to comparatively assess the impact of different types of violence on self-reported food insecurity in three prominent food crisis contexts: Burkina Faso, Syria, and Yemen.

COMBINING ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC DATA TO UNDERSTAND DETERMINANTS OF CONFLICTS IN COLOMBIA

Fiandrino S, Cattuto C, Paolotti D, Schifanella R

Conflicts cause immense human suffering, violate human rights and influence people stability. Since decades, Colombia  has been affected from high level of armed conflicts and violence. The complex mosaic of determinants of conflicts involves the political and socio-economic situation, the drug trafficking on the Colombian economy and the natural disasters affecting the country. In this work, we aim to evalute the role of the socio-economic and environmental determinants of conflicts in the Colombian context. To achieve these goals, we apply a spatial analysis to explore patterns and identify areas that suffer from high level of conflicts. We investigate the role of determinants and their relationship with conflicts through spatial regression models. We find that natural disasters and cocaine cultivation areas show a consistent and highly significant relationship with conflicts, while some socio-economic variables potentially considered as the main cause of conflicts show a surprisingly very little relationship.