Community Engagement to Gender Differentiated Impacts of Climate Change in Social Media
Amit Pariyar1, Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer2
1Amit Pariyar, Institute of Social Informatics and Technological Innovations, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), Kota Samarahan, 94300 Sarawak, Malaysia.
2Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer, Institute of Social Informatics and Technological Innovations, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), Kota Samarahan, 94300 Sarawak, Malaysia.
Manuscript received on 02 June 2019 | Revised Manuscript received on 10 June 2019 | Manuscript published on 30 June 2019 | PP: 1503-1509 | Volume-8 Issue-8, June 2019 | Retrieval Number: H6641068819/19©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: The social media has emerged as the most powerful tool to form public opinion on widespread issues. Presently topic on climate change and its impact on natural resources has gained significant interest in online discourse among social media users. With this shallow view on climate change, there is a possibility that its social impacts, for instance gender differentiated impacts of climate change, may become marginalized in online discourse. Besides this, other potential reasons for limited global discourse on social impacts of climate change, inter alia, are meagre role of civil society in global environmental governance, excessive media coverage on the observable destructs and prevailing gender inequalities in the society. The purpose of this research is to examine the status quo on how communities engages in an online discourse associating gender and climate change. To this end, we use keyword-based query method to extract twitter datasets and apply community engagement model to explore parameters such as demographics, geographic coverage, popular mentions, influential authors, popular hashtags and views expressed. The findings reveal varying degree of community engagement and suggests (a) the need for extensive online awareness campaigns (b) higher participation of male alongside female, mostly youths to sensitize gender issues in climate change (c) launching of official hashtags (d) exploiting organization and media outlets (e) strategies to target online campaigns in the climate vulnerable regions. This research contributed by giving future directions on generating online community engagement policies to create awareness on the social impacts of climate change, in particular, to the gender differentiated impacts.
Keyword: Climate Change, Community Engagement, Gender differentiated impacts, social impacts, social media.
Scope of the Article: Community Information Systems.