Powering Effective Climate Communication with a Climate Knowledge Base
This addresses the challenge of slow societal adoption of climate solutions by enabling more tailored communication, though it is incremental as it applies existing knowledge base techniques to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of ineffective climate communication by building a Climate Knowledge Base (ClimateKB) from free text to provide personalized climate information that motivates action based on individual values, with plans to open-source the resource for future use.
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.