1. Issue framing and evolving of climate change in China Shiwei FAN*, Jianhua XU**, Lan XUE*, Cheng LUO*** * School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University **Dept of Environmental Management, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University *** Dept. of Computer Science & Technology,Tsinghua University 1

2. Agenda Introduction Data and Methodology Preliminary results Conclusion and discussion 2

3. Introduction: Salience of climate change Largest GHG emitter China’s GHG EmissionIndustrial Emitters in China 3

4. Introduction: Salience of climate change Vulnerability of natural system and social-economic system 21 July Rainstorm in BeijingDamage areas by flood & drought in China 4

5. Introduction: Salience of climate change Consensus on addressing climate change risk through collective action President Hu Jintao making speech in UN climate conference Deputy director of NRDC Xie Zhenhua in charge of climate change issue working with BRICS 5

6. Introduction Promoting and recommen ding phase Prescribing phase Invoking phase Application phase Intelligence phase Appraisal phase Terminatin g phase Harold D. Lasswell, 1963 Which issue to attend to? Which attributes to incorporate? Which solution to examine? Which alternative to select? Issue A Issue B Issue CIssue K Attribute I Attribute IIAttribute G Alternative 1 Alternative 2 Alternative 3 Choice Attention Allocation Problem Characterization Alternative Generation Choice Agenda Setting Problem Definition Proposal and Debate Collective Choice 6

7. Introduction: importance of issue framing Policy Problem Issue FramingDecision Making 7

8. Introduction Climate change National Security Energy Strategy Poverty Eradication Gender Equality International Politics Disaster reduction …… Science disputes Policy disputes Multiple attributes and dimensions of climate change issue 8

9. Introduction Research Question: How climate change issue has been framed in China’s policy discourse? Climate change issue framing and issue evolution in China 9

10. Data and methodology Data source: People’s Daily Sample selection criteria: all articles mentioning climate change explicitly. Sample size: 4229 articles from 1947 to 2013 Why People’s Daily: official and authoritative newspaper of the government of China and Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. 10

11. Data and methodology Climate change: change of weatherClimate change: global warming Milestone: 1977.3.30 Discussion on the climate change of the world Three years of natural disasters around 1960sEndorsement of UNFCCC 11

12. Data and methodology Content analysis Text Variable Cause Effect Stable Relationship Judging and CodingCategorizing and Numbering 12

13. Data and methodology Technique: Natural Language Processing (NLP) TextRank for keyword extraction Weighted graphs with the scores of the vertex R. Mihalcea and P. Tarau. Textrank: Bringing order into texts. In Proceedings of EMNLP, volume 4, pages 404–411. Barcelona: ACL, 2004 13

14. Data and methodology Keyword Weighed Score 20 keywords with scores indicating the significance for every article. 14

15. Data and methodology All the keywords with the sum of scores in all the articles Top 500 high scores words Code dictionary extracted from top 500 words 15

16. Data and methodology Development diplomacy Climate change Economy Environment Energy Society Science & Technology Ecology Research Resource Agriculture Meteorology Safety GHG Food Politics Forestry Reform Investment Industry Engineering Innovation Urban Rural Biology Culture Education Disaster Sustainability Disaster Mitigation Transportation Poverty Public Health Military Construction Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Keyword 3 Keyword … Check the meaning by human coder Tagged with a topic label 36 topics 16

17. Data and methodology Factor 1Factor2…Factor #j Article #1Score 11 ……Score 1j Article #2………… …………… Article #iScore i1 ……Score ij Data Matrix 150 of 4229 (about 3.5% of all) articles have no tags indicating its topic dimension. 17

18. Preliminary results Climate change: change of weatherClimate change: global warming Milestone: 1977.3.30 Discussion on the climate change of the world 18

19. Preliminary results AgricultureDisaster DisasterMiti gation EconomyEnvironmentIndustryMeteorologyResearchResourceSampTSafety Transportati on Climate change Pearson Correlation.592 **.765 **.522 **.770 **.698 **.480 **.658 **.737 **.511 **.497 **.371 *.630 ** Sig. (2-tailed).001.000.003.000.007.000.004.005.043.000 1947-1977 Developme nt diplomacyEcologyEconomyEnergy Environmen t ForestryGHG Meteorolog y PoliticsResearchResourceSociety Climate change Pearson Correlation.594 *.502 *.729 **.843 **.678 **.893 **.745 **.914 **.758 **.708 **.611 *.689 **.790 ** Sig. (2- tailed).015.047.001.000.004.000.001.000.001.002.012.003.000 1977-1992 19

20. Preliminary results 1992-2013 AgricultureConstructionCulture Developmen t diplomacy DisasterMiti gation EcologyEconomyEducationEnergyEngineeringEnvironment Climatechan ge Pearson Correlation.529 *.519 *.673 **.696 **.766 **.730 **.512 *.682 **.477 *.867 **.443 *.844 ** Sig. (2-tailed).011.013.001.000.015.000.025.000.039.000 FoodForestryGHGIndustryInnovation Investmen t Meteorolo gy Politics PublicHeal th ReformResearchResourceRuralSampTSafetySociety Transporta tion.494 *.442 *.945 **.497 *.564 **.623 **.684 **.798 **.576 **.579 **.647 **.568 **.437 *.749 **.730 **.729 **.551 **.020.039.000.019.006.002.000.005.001.006.042.000.008 20

21. Preliminary results Weighted score of climate change by yearDifference of unweighted and weighted score of climate change 21

22. Preliminary results Climate change is covered more and more by other issues. The salience of climate change is being taken advantage of by others. 1977-2013 1992-2013 Define ratio=score of climate change/sum of scores of all factors 22

23. Conclusion and discussion Major findings 1. the shift in the issue implication of “climate change”. 2. Evolving of framing: 1947-1977: low concern on climate change and other related issue 1977-1992: dominance of environment and climate change on issues relating to climate change 1992-2013: rapid and explosive increase in the attention to climate change, but a changing paradigm in understanding climate change issue 3. More policy subsystems draw attention to climate change issue while it seems that the salience of climate change is being used. 23

24. Conclusion and discussion Implications to policy process Prevent the issue attention cycle from fading for the chronic risk issue of climate change need continuous attentions from policy makers. It’s indispensable to involve different agencies and sectors to address climate change together, because the climate change issue is not only a natural and environmental issue, but also a social and economic issue. Though several policy subsystems tend to attach their preferred issues and solutions to climate change, a strong will of addressing climate change from the top-level decision makers is necessary; China needs a top-down strategy or roadmap and a stronger government sector in climate change issue so as to make climate change “cover” and lead others, which can generate better governance. 24

25. Conclusion and discussion To improve the research validity 1. data: better way to detect what the policy makers are thinking about? 2. unsupervised learning technique: is it valid? 3. the research process: is the human coder reliable and credible? 25

26. Thank you Shiwei FAN*, Jianhua XU**, Lan XUE*, Cheng LUO*** * School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University **Dept of Environmental Management, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University *** Dept. of Computer Science & Technology,Tsinghua University 26

27. 27