A group of students from Professor Timmons Roberts' Climate and Development Lab at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society were selected as semi-finalists of the United Nation's Data for Climate Action Challenge. The team's proposed research project will use billions of social media posts to analyze how communities across the world respond to extreme weather events.

The challenge, part of a larger UN initiative to harness big data towards development and humanitarian efforts, connects researchers with data sets provided by various organizations, including Waze and Earth Networks. Several hundred research groups applied to participate in the challenge in April, after which the organizers selected semi-finalists.These semi-finalists receive access to the otherwise proprietary data sets and will use that data to execute their research.

The Brown researchers received the semifinalist selection for their proposal on how extreme weather events—like floods, hurricanes, and heat waves—affect user activity on social media platforms. Social media platforms play an important role in how individuals and communities communicate information about crises, including spreading information about threats, coordinating disaster response plans, and discussing the political and scientific causes of the situations. Over the course of the summer, the research team will analyze these social media posts and turn the data into a final submission, in the form of an academic paper, by September 15. The students will be looking at what these posts can tell us about the nature of disasters, how the responses vary between different types of disasters or different regions, and what blame people place on human-caused climate change.

The winners of the data challenge will be announced at an award ceremony at the 2017 UN Climate Change Convention in Bonn, Germany, which new CDL members will be attending with Professor Roberts as part of the class Engaged Climate Policy at the UN Climate Talks.