Climate Policy Tracker: Pipeline for automated analysis of public climate policies

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated pipeline using LDA for analyzing and summarizing 10 years of EU climate policies, enhancing accessibility and comparative understanding of government framing and language in climate policy documents.

Contribution

It introduces a novel LDA-based method for automatic analysis and comparison of national climate policies, facilitating better public engagement and policy research.

Findings

Effective summarization of policy documents

Detection of nuanced policy framing differences

Enhanced comparative analysis across countries

Abstract

The number of standardized policy documents regarding climate policy and their publication frequency is significantly increasing. The documents are long and tedious for manual analysis, especially for policy experts, lawmakers, and citizens who lack access or domain expertise to utilize data analytics tools. Potential consequences of such a situation include reduced citizen governance and involvement in climate policies and an overall surge in analytics costs, rendering less accessibility for the public. In this work, we use a Latent Dirichlet Allocation-based pipeline for the automatic summarization and analysis of 10-years of national energy and climate plans (NECPs) for the period from 2021 to 2030, established by 27 Member States of the European Union. We focus on analyzing policy framing, the language used to describe specific issues, to detect essential nuances in the way governments frame their climate policies and achieve climate goals. The methods leverage topic modeling and clustering for the comparative analysis of policy documents across different countries. It allows for easier integration in potential user-friendly applications for the development of theories and processes of climate policy. This would further lead to better citizen governance and engagement over climate policies and public policy research.