Social Media Analysis of Climate Change in Africa

ABSTRACT

Climate change is a pressing concern in Africa. In this paper, we employ sentiment analysis, event spike detection, and topic modelling techniques to analyse social media posts about climate change in Africa. In contrast to prior findings, we find that discourse on climate change in Africa covers a wide variety of topics including politics, money, energy, and research. How- ever, we also identify we also identified optimal number of 13 topics based on a peak in uMass coherence measure of topics and top 10 words from each topic. Named Entity Recognition analysis showed that EU has been spearheading ambitious climate efforts. These results demonstrate that posts associated with climate change in Africa are positive and that climate change impact and awareness in Africa is increasing.

Keywords: Climate Change, Social Media Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modelling, Public Opinion