Indexing and Visualization of Climate Change Narratives Using BERT and Causal Extraction
Hiroki Sakaji, Noriyasu Kaneda
TL;DR
This paper presents a novel framework to extract, index, and visualize climate change narratives from news text by leveraging BERT for topic classification and causal extraction to identify cause–effect relations. By linking topic judgments with causal information, it constructs climate change narratives across time and topics, and represents them as a topic-based index and a narrative index embedded in network visualizations. Key findings show that narrative attention concentrates around international conferences, shifts toward corporate and market implications since 2018, and increasingly connects environmental regulation with monetary policy and macroeconomics, while natural disaster narratives intensify. The approach offers a data-driven lens to study how economic agents perceive climate risk and policy, with potential applications in forecasting, policy analysis, and broader narrative economics research.
Abstract
In this study, we propose a methodology to extract, index, and visualize ``climate change narratives'' (stories about the connection between causal and consequential events related to climate change). We use two natural language processing methods, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and causal extraction, to textually analyze newspaper articles on climate change to extract ``climate change narratives.'' The novelty of the methodology could extract and quantify the causal relationships assumed by the newspaper's writers. Looking at the extracted climate change narratives over time, we find that since 2018, an increasing number of narratives suggest the impact of the development of climate change policy discussion and the implementation of climate change-related policies on corporate behaviors, macroeconomics, and price dynamics. We also observed the recent emergence of narratives focusing on the linkages between climate change-related policies and monetary policy. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness of the negative impacts of natural disasters (e.g., abnormal weather and severe floods) related to climate change on economic activities, and this issue might be perceived as a new challenge for companies and governments. The methodology of this study is expected to be applied to a wide range of fields, as it can analyze causal relationships among various economic topics, including analysis of inflation expectation or monetary policy communication strategy.