And the final speaker in our panel at the Social Media & Society conference is Risto Kunelius himself, focussing particularly on the loss and damage community which also emerged from our practice mapping of the COP27 climate summit Twitter data. COP27 instituted a Loss and Damage fund as a milestone outcome; this recognises the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities across countries, and emerges from a much longer debate about climate change responsibility and justice.
This project filtered the COP27 dataset for mentions of the loss and damage efforts, then, and explored the dominant (and absent) actors and content. This explores what kind of debate this key focus on loss and damage generates, and what its key themes are; the approach is simplified also by the substantial concentration of user activities on a handful of very widely retweeted posts.
Much of the loss and damage debate is about money, politics, responsibility, geography, history, and justice; these themes intersect with each other, too: politics and money, and politics and geography, are most closely connected, and these also strongly align with themes of time.
Within the overall debate captured in the COP27 dataset, the loss and damage debate occurs only in specific subsets: in an overall UN-related clusters, as well as in a specific Pakistani cluster, following then-recent environmental disasters.
The core UN debate space also breaks down further into a number of distinct sub-communities: UN climate governance, climate justice advocates, climate activists, and UK-related sub-clusters addressed the theme most strongly. These sub-clusters variously emphasised themes of money or politics, and themes of justice and responsibility.
Debate is thus very strongly focussed on politics and money, which is appropriate given the specific nature of the Loss and Damage fund as a particular instrument; discussions of justice and responsibility are less prominent here because stakeholders generally avoid any direct attribution of responsibility at these events. US accounts (then still representing the Biden administration) are notably absent from any of these public discussions.
