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<p>Despite climate change and biodiversity loss becoming defining crises, their patterns of public engagement remain poorly understood. The use of Reddit, a social media discussion forum with over 1.2&#xa0;billion monthly active users, offers untapped potential to fill this knowledge gap. Here we analyze 15 years of Reddit discussions on r/environment, comprising 1,888,236 comments and 395,391 submissions, using deep learning transformer-based topic modeling (BERTopic) to identify twenty clusters spanning environmental issues, sustainable habits, energy sources, climate change impacts and climate politics. We find rising attention to climate politics and climate change impacts, punctuated by spikes around protests, policy announcements, and disasters. Wildfires and warmest weather follow an increasingly clear seasonal cycle, reflecting their growing regularity as lived climate impacts. Comparisons with Google Trends show strong convergence for problem-focused topics such as climate change impacts and energy sources but divergence in sustainable habits and climate politics. Most correlations occur contemporaneously, establishing Reddit as a real-time barometer of climate salience. Together, these results highlight the potential of social media to capture the evolving pulse of environmental discourse in fragmented digital publics.</p>

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Mapping the pulse of environmental discourse: fifteen years of Reddit and Google trends

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年2月26日

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  • Timothy B. L. Yee,
  • L. Roman Carrasco,
  • Kokil Jaidka

摘要

Despite climate change and biodiversity loss becoming defining crises, their patterns of public engagement remain poorly understood. The use of Reddit, a social media discussion forum with over 1.2 billion monthly active users, offers untapped potential to fill this knowledge gap. Here we analyze 15 years of Reddit discussions on r/environment, comprising 1,888,236 comments and 395,391 submissions, using deep learning transformer-based topic modeling (BERTopic) to identify twenty clusters spanning environmental issues, sustainable habits, energy sources, climate change impacts and climate politics. We find rising attention to climate politics and climate change impacts, punctuated by spikes around protests, policy announcements, and disasters. Wildfires and warmest weather follow an increasingly clear seasonal cycle, reflecting their growing regularity as lived climate impacts. Comparisons with Google Trends show strong convergence for problem-focused topics such as climate change impacts and energy sources but divergence in sustainable habits and climate politics. Most correlations occur contemporaneously, establishing Reddit as a real-time barometer of climate salience. Together, these results highlight the potential of social media to capture the evolving pulse of environmental discourse in fragmented digital publics.