Do Extreme Weather Events Influence How Political Parties Behave Regarding Climate Issues?

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Politicians and political parties routinely publish press releases on various topics, including those related to the environment and environmental policy. The focus or attention of a given party or politician on one issue or another can be reflected by the relative frequency with which they publish a press release on a given topic. Recent research explored how extreme weather events (fatal storms, floods, wildfires, and extreme temperatures - all of which are signifiers of a changing climate) influenced the attention paid by European politicians to climate, sustainability, and environmental policies. After analyzing 260,000 press releases published over a 10-year period from 9 EU countries, they found that only explicitly defined “green” parties increased their attention on climate issues following extreme weather events.

Weather and The Year of Elections

One of my favorite downtime activities when traveling abroad is watching international news outlets cover stories happening in the US. It often feels foreign, both because news is happening there and I’m here and because the tone and temperature of the discourse seems so mild (or at least different) compared to what we’re used to in the US. For example, on a recent trip to the UK, I was stopped in my tracks when, in a story on a new energy development project in the area, a government official stated on camera that (paraphrasing) we “…need to make sure any new development takes into account the life-cycle impacts so that we do not continue contributing to climate change.” Not coincidentally, the news outlet presented that story alongside one on a heat wave that was also sweeping the area. Since returning stateside, there’s been a steady beat of extreme weather stories spanning the early, destructive hurricane that landed in Texas, tornadoes in the Midwest, flooding in Canada, and others.

On top of extreme weather coverage, news outlets both in the US and abroad are, of course all over the elections around the world. It turns out that countries representing nearly 50% of the global population will undergo a national election in 2024, totaling 64 countries plus the European Union.

Our focus in Sustainability at the Frontier is to dig into new research and insights that can help us to understand what’s happening at the leading edge of sustainability and how that might apply to our work or otherwise inform our perspectives. So, with the recent exposure to a deluge of extreme weather news and election coverage, I was delighted to see that Tim Wappenhans and co-authors just published a short research study in leading journal Nature Climate Change that asked a related, compelling question: How do politicians act (and react) on matters related to the environment and climate change when extreme weather events happen?

Let’s dig in.

Press Releases as a Proxy for Political Attention

In simple terms, we might think of how individual politicians and political parties care about one issue or another as reflected by some combination of:

1. What they say

2. The bills that they help write and shape

3. How they vote

By sheer volume, we’d expect to have far more evidence on the attention and posture of an individual politician on a given political issue in (1) more than (2) or (3). It turns out that the press release is an increasingly common instrument for politicians to speak directly on some issue, both to articulate a position or relevant news item to constituents and to provide the press with fodder to (for example) build out a story on some news item of the day.

Before reading this research article, I felt that “yeah, that makes sense; comms teams for politicians probably put out press releases every so often to update people on what’s happening.” However I grossly underestimated the number of releases and the range of topic areas. As one example, I visited the website of US Senator Dick Durbin, a long-serving Senator from Illinois, to understand the number and type of press releases his team put out. I was somewhat shocked by what I found!

Here’s a screenshot of his most recent press release as of July 17, 2024:

The content of that specific press release wasn’t so shocking - it was the massive number of press releases contained across multiple pages:

Each page had about 20 unique entries, putting the total number of published press releases since he became US Senator in 2006 at roughly 8,000. The pace at which press releases are put out has increased dramatically - his office put out 16 press releases in the past week alone - nearly five times the total number of press releases they put out in all of 2006!

I bring up these facts and figures as one example to illustrate that politicians increasingly put information out about news and the issues they care about in press releases. As a researcher, this can open up all sorts of interesting questions and possibilities, mainly if you analyze the contents of press releases alongside other data or information to explore a relationship. And that’s exactly what the research team did for the article we’re examining here.

Specifically, the research team did the following:

1. Gathered 260,000+ press releases from politicians and political parties from nine European Countries: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK, dated between 2010 and 2020.

2. Analyzed data on “extreme weather” events corresponding to fatal storms, floods, wildfires, and high temperatures in the nine countries between 2010 and 2020.

3. Classified all press releases as to whether the release covers the topic of Environment, defined by the authors as a press release discussing climate, sustainability, and environmental policies. The authors classified the presence or absence of discussion around the topic of Environment as Attention.

4. Analyzed whether, on average, the Attention paid by politicians (again, as demonstrated through press releases) to environmental issues changed after an extreme weather event occurred.

The authors used a statistical technique called Difference-in-Differences to gauge how much Attention changed after an extreme weather event. In brief, this means they established an overall “Average Attention” across all the data. They looked at the Attention to Environmental issues before and after a given extreme weather event. Let’s take a look at a graph illustrating their key findings related to Floods:

A lot is going on in the above graph; here’s how to interpret it:

1. Dashed Line: The average attention paid in press releases on climate and the environment in the data set.

2. Blue triangles and lines: The blue triangles represent an estimated “average attention paid to the environment before a flood event.” The blue lines represent the 95% confidence interval of the mean - there’s a 95% chance the true average falls somewhere between the extents of the line.

3. Red circles and lines: The red circles represent the “average attention paid to the environment after a flood event.” The red lines represent the 95% confidence interval, as described above.

4. The numbers -6 to 6: This refers to observations in press releases up to 6 weeks before (

OK, now we understand the data, methods, and techniques this group used to display their results. So, what did they find when analyzing the political press release data across all types of extreme weather events?

The key results show that attention paid to the Environment (i.e., sustainability and climate change issues) did not increase across the entire data set they analyzed across nine countries and more than 260,000 press releases over ten years. They did a separate analysis evaluating whether there were any political party-specific trends, finding a tiny, short-term uptick in attention to climate issues in those parties identified as green-leaning. This is a staggering result for a few reasons:

• They in part defined Extreme Weather as events that resulted in fatalities, which you’d expect to produce a stronger signal and spur attention (and action) by politicians more than a run-of-the-mill storm.

• The “null result” shows no increased attention held up across multiple categories of environmental issues (save for the small effect seen with green-leaning parties) across numerous political parties, countries, and years.

• European voters are pretty attuned to climate issues (remember my comment above about the politician bringing up life-cycle thinking?). In fact, the European Investment Bank recently polled more than 30,000 adults and found that the UK and EU have a better understanding of the definition and causes of climate change than those surveyed in the US. Hence, it seems reasonable that an informed population would be a receptive audience to politicians talking about climate change, particularly in the wake of extreme weather events. Here’s a figure showing some results of that European Investment Bank poll on the relative grasp on fundamental definitions and causes of climate change:

Final Insights and Takeaways

The authors of this new study showed compelling evidence that in the geographies and periods studied, extreme weather events appear to have very little influence on the average attention paid by various politicians and political parties on climate-related matters. Their use of press releases as a proxy for the attention paid to environmental or climate issues was a clever one, given the sheer volume and velocity of information contained therein. As we discussed, press releases are one measure to display how political parties and politicians think, but that the “null” result held across multiple years, geographies, and (most) political parties across a range of extreme weather events is telling.

Although it’s crucial not to generalize these results beyond their study boundary, it raises the question of “if extreme weather events can’t get politicians to talk about and pay more attention to climate matters, what will?” There’s an interesting disconnect buried within the paper we reviewed here, namely the citation of previous studies (here and here) showing that extreme weather events influence voter opinions, including on climate change. So if extreme weather events sway constituents, but politicians aren’t swayed, that suggests other influential factors might be needed (e.g., displaying economic growth potential from climate tech, etc.) to spur attention and policy to mitigate or adapt to climate change.

Of course, press releases may be an imperfect measure of what politicians are genuinely paying attention to. Even if there was an observed effect shown in this study that increased attention was paid after extreme weather events, it’s not a given that the increased attention leads to action like bills written to address climate change, and the passage and implementation of those hypothetical bills.

It could be an informative exercise to re-create the methods used by this study’s authors to see if extreme weather in the US has a notable effect on how Senators or congressional representatives pay attention to climate. The results could go further by assessing voting records on related issues (e.g., by linking raw vote information (e.g., via the US Senate’s vote tallies) or leveraging aggregated data put together by others (e.g., that compiled by GovTrack or the scorecards and vote tallies on climate-related issues specifically published by groups like the League of Conservation Voters)). Such work could provide important clues for those advocating for investment and pro-climate legislation to understand better the best mechanisms to reach and spur action from lawmakers.

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