Powering Effective Climate Communication with a Climate Knowledge Base

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel climate knowledge base (ClimateKB) built from free text to enhance personalized climate communication, aiming to motivate individual action based on personal values.

Contribution

It presents the construction of a comprehensive ClimateKB from free text and discusses its potential to improve personalized climate communication systems.

Findings

Constructed a new ClimateKB from free text sources.

Proposed methods for aligning climate causes and effects with personal values.

Open-sourced ClimateKB and related tools for future research.

Abstract

While many accept climate change and its growing impacts, few converse about it well, limiting the adoption speed of societal changes necessary to address it. In order to make effective climate communication easier, we aim to build a system that presents to any individual the climate information predicted to best motivate and inspire them to take action given their unique set of personal values. To alleviate the cold-start problem, the system relies on a knowledge base (ClimateKB) of causes and effects of climate change, and their associations to personal values. Since no such comprehensive ClimateKB exists, we revisit knowledge base construction techniques and build a ClimateKB from free text. We plan to open source the ClimateKB and associated code to encourage future research and applications.