The political (in)significance of extreme weather events

Tackling the climate crisis in an appropriate way - making governments sign international climate agreements and letting citizens live up to them - proves difficult.

A much-given explanation for this problem is the fact that many of the crisis' consequences are only about to happen in a distant future complicates making them visible and tangible in the present. However, extreme weather events (e.g., floods, heatwaves, hurricanes) might have the potential to break this pattern.

This project investigates this potential, through analyzing the political impact of extreme weather in the American, Dutch, and Austrian public spheres.

It will include three sub-studies: 1) mixed-method analyses (computational and qualitative investigations) of a wide variety of extreme weather events in newspapers, parliamentary debates, and policy documents from the three country contexts, to research to what extent, how, and why they impact political perceptions of the climate crisis; 2) a comparison of these results to analyses (based on similar data and methods) of the impact of terrorist events, occurrences which often seem to invoke more immediate and substantial political impact than extreme weather events; 3) interviews with public actors (journalists, politicians, scientists), to research the cultural and institutional opportunities and constrains they face in the (non-)creation of extreme weather event impact.

All together, this project adds to two relatively under-developed sociological fields: environmental sociology and the sociology of events.

On a societal level, it can potentially help politicians and policy makers with how they can, through their responses to extreme weather events, better handle the climate crisis.