Rio de Janeiro and climate crisis: governance, interactivity and discursive construction on Twitter

Rio de Janeiro y crisis climática: gobernanza, interactividad y construcción discursiva en el Twitter

Abstract

The rains that fell on the city of Rio de Janeiro in April 2019 were the heaviest in decades, affecting people’s lives in different ways and causing the death of ten people. In the face of the fragility of environmental governance in this region, this study sought to understand how the topic of climate change was addressed on Twitter during an extreme weather event. We performed a thematic analysis of data from tweets posted between 7 and 10 April 2019 retrieved from the Twitter API using an open source R package, yielding 375,000 tweets. Our findings highlight Twitter users’ criticism of climate denial in agendas at different levels of government and suggest that new media such as Twitter open up opportunities for repoliticizing climate change and redemocratizing decision-making spaces in the face of climate injustice.

Keywords:
Rio de Janeiro; Rains; Climate Crisis; Governance; Twitter