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Biodiversität betrifft viele verschiedene Aspekte von Politik – Energieproduktion, invasive Ar- ten, Pestizide oder die Rückkehr des Wolfes sind nur wenige davon. Dementsprechend sollte eine effektive Biodiversitätspolitik auch in vielen verschiedenen Bereichen präsent sein. Ein For- schungsprojekt der WSL und der Eawag zeigt, dass dies kaum der Fall ist.

We study the discursive resonance of online climate skepticism in traditional media in Germany, a country where climate skeptics lack public prestige and thus form a political counter-movement. We thereby differentiate two temporal dynamics: resonance can be continuous or selective, based on the exploitation of specific events. Beyond, we test whether such resonance is higher within the conservative media. We rely on news value theory to shed light on the mechanism facilitating or hindering such resonance and identify three indicators for resonance: frames, positions and actors. Using various computational methods as well as qualitative case studies, we examine the skeptical and traditional media discourses over a period of two years. Our analysis shows that there is no continuous resonance. However, our data reveal selective resonance: skeptics’ manage to exploit specific events pushing their frames and positions onto traditional media’s agenda. Thereby, conservative media did not give greater resonance to climate skeptical voices whereas they resort to downplaying the issue by allocating less space to it.

Supplemental material, Online_appendix_16.5 for Coalitions and counter-coalitions in online contestation: An analysis of the German and British climate change debate by Silke Adam, Thomas Häussler, Hannah Schmid-Petri and Ueli Reber in New Media & Society

We examine how the political context in which actors are embedded relates to their online communication. We argue that the degree of contentiousness of an issue (high vs. low conflict) is a decisive factor in explaining the distinct network structures generated by the actors’ hyperlink patterns. Comparing two such networks originating in the United States and Germany in the area of clilmate change, we found systematic differences between them that result in distinct political hyperlink topologies, which reflect the underlying issue context. These differences become visible in the reciprocity of the actors’ hyperlink communication, the fragmentation of the networks along the political divide, the recognition issue opponents receive from the media, and the transnational orientation of climate advocates and skeptics. This research implies that hyperlink communication is responsive to the political context, and that countermovements, in particular, manage to reap the benefits from online communication mobilization efforts.

Das Gebiet Häftli ist trotz Kläranlagen- und Schleusenbaus (letzteres für die Frischwasserzufuhr) stark überdüngt. Befürchtungen, dass die übermässige Phosphorbelastung hauptsächlich von der nahegelegenen Kläranlage Orpund stammt, erwiesen sich als unbegründet: Mittels Markierversuchs und Berechnungen konnte gezeigt werden, dass der mittlere ARA-Anteil wohl rund einen Drittel der kritischen jährlichen Belastung von 1,3 g P/m2 ausmacht. Da die effektive jährliche Belastung von 4,9 g P/ml aber viel zu hoch ist, fällt der ARA-Anteil kaum ins Gewicht.

This dissertations pursues three research objectives: (1) map how transnational the online public discourse on the global phenomenon of climate change is, (2) understand the role of the (trans)nationalized online public discourses on climate change in today’s hybrid media system, and (3) find, implement, and validate computational methods to study public discourses across different political and language spaces. Devoted to these objectives, the three articles included in this thesis produced the following results: (1) The public discourse on climate change is transnationalized to a considerable degree. First, the same topics define the issue in the countries studied. However, some of the topics are of different importance to the actors in these countries. Second, the discourses in the countries are shaped by both domestic and foreign actors. However, the scope of transnationalization is restricted to countries of the Global North, with a clear bias towards the United States. The Global South is thus a blind spot. (2) For the studied case of Germany, there is no evidence for continuous resonance among climate change skeptics’ online communication and legacy media. However, there are occasions of selective resonance when climate change skeptics manage to exploit specific events to push their perspectives and positions onto the mass media’s agenda. The influence of the transnational skeptical counter-movement on German mainstream discourse is therefore limited. (3) The combination of machine translation and topic models is a great option when it comes to the automated analysis of large multilingual corpora. Regardless of whether full texts or only the vocabulary of a corpus is translated, the approach produces reliable and robust results. Moreover, the analysis of transnational discourse convergence has shown that machine translation and topic models can also be used for comparative research.

We examine how the political context in which actors are embedded relates to their online communication. We argue that the degree of contentiousness of an issue (high vs. low conflict) is a decisive factor in explaining the distinct network structures generated by the actors’ hyperlink patterns. Comparing two such networks originating in the United States and Germany in the area of clilmate change, we found systematic differences between them that result in distinct political hyperlink topologies, which reflect the underlying issue context. These differences become visible in the reciprocity of the actors’ hyperlink communication, the fragmentation of the networks along the political divide, the recognition issue opponents receive from the media, and the transnational orientation of climate advocates and skeptics. This research implies that hyperlink communication is responsive to the political context, and that countermovements, in particular, manage to reap the benefits from online communication mobilization efforts.