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HEIndividual fellowship2022–2024

Weather Events · The political (in)significance of extreme weather events

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2022-09-01 → 2024-08-31
EU contribution
€175,920
Participants
1
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

The political (in)significance of extreme weather events

Climate change is a very urgent problem, which threatens many societies across the globe – and in the coming decades will be doing even more so. However, while the wide majority of climate scientists agree on the urgency of the problem, it turns out to be very difficult to tackle it: to come up with political agreements to do so, and let governments and citizens live up to them. A main reason for these difficulties, seems to be that the problems of climate change are for many people currently too abstract and far way. But when, in the next decades, they will become more concrete, it will be too late. This is called the “Giddens’ Paradox”. Extreme weather events might be opportunities to overcome this paradox, as they – in the form of floodings, heatwaves, droughts, et cetera – provide very concrete insights on what might be the status quo in term of climate change, if no actions will be taken. The aim of this Marie Curie project is to see to what extent extreme weather events indeed bring about opportunities for the introduction of sustainable policies and actions. It does so by making analyses of the impact of extreme weather within national public spheres (media, parliamentary debates, election programs) over the last decades, by using a mixed methods perspective of content analyses. Concretely the project has four key objectives: 1. To better understand the relationship between extreme weather and climate crisis politics 2. To develop more knowledge on the sociological dimensions of the climate crisis 3. To further our understandings of impact of events on social life more generally 4. To develop a mixed methods content analyses approach for researching events

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Tackling the climate crisis in an appropriate way - making governments sign international climate agreements and letting citizens live up to them - proves difficult. A much-given explanation for this problem is the fact that many of the crisis' consequences are only about to happen in a distant future complicates making them visible and tangible in the present. However, extreme weather events (e.g., floods, heatwaves, hurricanes) might have the potential to break this pattern. This project investigates this potential, through analyzing the political impact of extreme weather in the American, Dutch, and Austrian public spheres. It will include three sub-studies: 1) mixed-method analyses (computational and qualitative investigations) of a wide variety of extreme weather events in newspapers, parliamentary debates, and policy documents from the three country contexts, to research to what extent, how, and why they impact political perceptions of the climate crisis; 2) a comparison of these results to analyses (based on similar data and methods) of the impact of terrorist events, occurrences which often seem to invoke more immediate and substantial political impact than extreme weather events; 3) interviews with public actors (journalists, politicians, scientists), to research the cultural and institutional opportunities and constrains they face in the (non-)creation of extreme weather event impact. All together, this project adds to two relatively under-developed sociological fields: environmental sociology and the sociology of events. On a societal level, it can potentially help politicians and policy makers with how they can, through their responses to extreme weather events, better handle the climate crisis.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN · LeuvenCoordinatorBelgium

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union