Methodology
Unless otherwise stated, the data in this report is taken from research conducted in September 2020 that looked at content posted to social media, blog, and news websites between January 1st 2010 – September 15th 2020. Where additional desk research has been consulted, we have included citation in the body.
To aggregate and prepare data for analysis a collection of separate queries were written into consumer data platform, Brandwatch. Analysis of audience demographic data is drawn from Brandwatch’s Audience platform. All queries were set to period January 1st 2010 – September 15th 2020. The dataset consulted consists of over 1.3 trillion public documents. NB. Whilst efforts were made to capture as much of the global conversation as possible, it is inevitable that some mentions in both English and other languages have been inadvertently omitted from analysis.
Where user behaviours on search engines is consulted, we have used data captured from Google Trends. Google’s search engine represents over 70% of the total global search engine market on desktop, alongside over 90% of searches performed on mobile devices (Smart Insights, “Search Engine Marketing Statistics 2020”).
Where mention is made of “discussion around environmental issues” this indicates a broad sample of conversation comprising topics: climate change, global warming, climate crisis, climate action, clean energy, renewable energy, renewable power, sustainability, carbon neutrality, carbon footprint, carbon reduction, and net zero. Adjacent topics (for example “subsidy free” or “not in my backyard”) are included within this conversation set, but when broken out – for clarity, or specific analysis – this is indicated in the report.