Analyzing the news on climate change
This post was written by John Duprey, technology architect at Thomson Reuters
Introduced in time for this week’s UN Climate Summit 2014 and Climate Week NYC, Sustainability Analytics, a new tool from Thomson Reuters, captures and reports changes in interest levels and examines the appearance and impact of major climate-related events, discussions and campaigns across global news media. We’ve analyzed millions of stories from more than 1,800 English language news sources and applied advanced analytic tools to identify trending topics, people and companies in the climate-change news.
The analytic resource was developed by Thomson Reuters in collaboration with UN Global Pulse, a special initiative of the United Nations Secretary-General on big data innovation for sustainable development and humanitarian action.
Global Pulse does data analytic work for multiple UN initiatives, and created a site to monitor conversations about climate change on Twitter. They generated a variety of analytics about topic trends and top mentions, and then asked us to do the same, using a set of data from our vast news collections.
In the news release, Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president, research and development, Thomson Reuters, remarked “Applying analytical technologies to media coverage can help people around the globe better track and understand how conversations on climate change are playing out in the news. This is a meaningful application of our mission to provide intelligent information that helps people make informed decisions and act with confidence in a complex world. Working together with UN Global Pulse, our objective is to make the global conversation on climate change more visible, helping lead to a better, more sustainable world in which we all live.”
Visit Sustainability to view the site. You also can visit the Sustainability Analytics tool, view the announcement or read commentary about the new tool on the Sustainability blog.