Evolution of the Social Debate on Climate Crisis: Insights from Twitter During the Conferences of the Parties

Social media have long been recognized as a valuable proxy for investigating users' opinions by echoing virtual venues where individuals engage in daily discussions on a wide range of topics. Among them, climate change is gaining momentum due to its large-scale impact, tangible consequences for society, and enduring nature. In this work, we investigate the social debate surrounding climate emergency, with particular emphasis on the Conference of the Parties (COP), the foremost global forum for multilateral discussion on climate-related matters. To this aim, we leverage graph mining and text mining techniques to analyze a large corpus of tweets spanning 7 years, aiming to uncover the fundamental patterns underlying the climate debate, thus providing valuable support for strategic and operational decision-making. Our contribution in this work is manifold: (i) we provide insights into the key social actors involved in the climate debate and their relationships, (ii) we unveil the main topics discussed during COPs within the social landscape, (iii) we assess the evolution of users' sentiment and emotions across time. Furthermore, our proposed approach has the potential to scale up to other emergency issues, highlighting its versatility and potential for broader use in analyzing the increasingly debated emergent phenomena.