Facebook yesterday announced its partnership with climate advocacy groups, including the World Resources Institute and the Yale Program on Climate Change. It will soon release an interactive Climate Conversation Map, a visualisation of where climate change-related links are most talked about in Facebook. The map will be available to researchers and non-profits and is intended to inform and add resources to the climate debate.

The map is regularly updated using an automated daily pull of the total external link shares on Facebook, as well as the volume of reshares, comments and reactions to the links. Links containing the keywords “climate change” or “global warming” are then flagged. The data is anonymised, collated and computed into a series of colour-coded world maps, with the darkest green indicating the most lively spots for climate change conversation.

The map spans 21 major languages based on population size and number of active Facebook users. In Facebook’s latest blog report, it reports that from August 2019 to February 2020 Australia had the highest percentage of engagement, followed by New Zealand and countries in Europe and the Americas such as Norway and Canada.This map is the latest in a series of AI mapping tools released by Facebook focused on environmental causes, including, recently in partnership with Microsoft, the Map with AI tool that automates the previously time-consuming process of annotating roads, bridges and buildings.

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