Climate, environment and society

 Following the Paris Agreement on climate change, Norway and most other UN-countries are committed to significant emission reductions by 2050. In addition, many countries face a series of nature and environ­mental goals and obligations. Achieving this goal requires careful assessment of challenges and opportunities as well as measures that promote a green transition towards a clean and sustainable economy. A primary objective among policymakers is that the transition should generate jobs, economic growth, promote trade and good living conditions, but these consequences are yet to be known.

We apply administrative register data on occupations and firms to study whether industries, occupations and firms differ in terms of development, location, job creation and job reallocation depending on greenness, where the greenness of industries and occupations are based on information on industry-specific pollution and environmental damage as well as the greenness of tasks and skills using O*NET. We apply both a binary (green/non-green) and a continuous definition (greenness). Another approach is to apply the administrative register data on patents, and their textual information. For innovations, we can use the CPC-classification of patents to classify patents as green (“clean technologies”) or other. We will also explore alternative definitions based on textual analyses (from key phrases in patents).

Subproject 1 builds on results and data from the NFR project «Power, structure and technology (PST)». Data on occupations, enterprises and industry codes are obtained from this project.

Participants

Harald Dale-Olsen Research Professor Institute for Social Research	Erling Barth Research Professor Institute for Social Research
Pål Schøne Research Professor Institute for Social Research	Kjersti Misje Østbakken Research Director, Work and Welfare Institute for Social Research

A major challenge for the cause of preventing climate change is that climate change can seem abstract and distant to people in their everyday lives. The media may play a role as translators, by putting climate change on the agenda and by presenting the consequences of climate change, as well as potential measures. Knowledge about how national and local media fill this role is scarce, as well as insights in which links are made to other political issues or agendas. For example, does local news coverage more often emphasize consequences in terms of transport, personal lifestyles or the labour market than national news coverage?

This pilot project uses big content data to analyze the coverage of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report in national and local media in Norway. The aim is twofold: to describe differences between national and local news coverage, and to explain variations at the local level coverage based on differences in municipal characteristics. Among the factors we study are local vulnerability to climate change, and expected local consequences of climate measures (for business, labour market or nature).

Participants

Voters are divided when it comes to support for measures to counter climate change. Can moral psychological perspectives help explain this variation? Previous research suggests that the moral framing of a political message can influence how citizens receive that message depending on their own moral values. If such findings are prove to be robust, this has implications for how climate policies should be communicated to gain broad support. Our project builds on this research.

The subproject will investigate two hypotheses. The first is that climate-related content in Norwegian news media is morally charged with "progressive" or universalist values ​​(e.g., care, international solidarity and justice) and to a lesser extent reflects more conservative or traditional values ​​(e.g., loyalty to local community or nation). To investigate this, we analyze a selection of commentary and editorials from Norwegian news media. The second hypothesis is that people's acceptance of climate policy measures increases if the message is framed in a way that corresponds to their own moral values. This will be investigated by means of survey experiments where the respondents are randomized to read different texts that contain climate policy messages with different moral valuations before answering questions about their attitudes to climate measures.

Participants

Norway is a donor country for aid. Because of the increasing climate changes, the Norwegian government has promised to double the funding for climate aid by 2026, from 7 to 14 billion kroner. Norad, the Norwegian agency for development cooperation, assumes that climate change will soon be the dominating topic of Norwegian aid. 

That people must move due to disasters and swindling livelihoods is often highlighted as one of the largest potential social consequences of climate change. According to Norad, Norwegian climate aid is channelled towards initiatives which will aid people to adapt to the consequences of climate changes where they live, and by so doing help to prevent that people will have to move. 

While climate change adaptation is a relatively new topic within Norwegian aid, countries like Bangladesh, which is an aid receiving country, have already implemented a range of climate change adaptation initiatives. Here, migration as a consequence of climate change is central to the discussion of how successful climate change adaptation is deemed to be. It is therefore of interest to examine how conceptualizations of climate migration and assumptions of how aid can assist people who are vulnerable to climate change in the Norwegian aid administration match with the understandings of aid workers who are working with these questions in Bangladesh. This is important because different expectations between donors and implementation partners may cause aid to be less efficient. 

Participants