Climate Crisis in Rio de Janeiro City: information agents and territories in Twitter

Abstract

The present research is the attempt to depict Rio de Janeiro City - Brazil – at a specific moment, when one witnessed an extreme climate event. This attempt took place in Twitter’s virtual universe and its aim was to understand the dynamics featuring social participation in processes to produce information about the climate crisis, i.e., identifying information agents and territories. The analyzed data were collected from publications in Twitter related to the heavy rainfall events recorded in April 2019, in Rio de Janeiro City. These data were collected from Twitter API, in R programming environment. We used the thematic analysis methodological approach at two stages to analyze 375 thousand tweets. This data analysis was added with information provided by IBGE and DATA.RIO. Based on the main results, conditioning factors linked to the digital exclusion of populations mostly affected by the climate crisis, mainly schooling and income of populations living in territories mostly affected by the observed climate event, are determining elements. Results have also indicated the relevance of fighting climate denialism, mainly in public spheres, as well as of creating work agendas aimed at strengthening social participation as mechanism to expand climate governance and to reduce environmental injustices.