New publication: What do regional governments write about climate change on their websites?

Moritz Schütz and Dr. Sebastian Losacker, together with Prof. Dr. Stefan Hennemann, have published their new research article, “What do regional governments write about climate change on their websites? A natural language processing study of German regions,” in the journal Global Challenges & Regional Science.

The paper examines the role of regional governments as communicative actors in climate change and analyzes how climate risks as well as mitigation and adaptation measures are addressed on German county websites. Drawing on a large-scale text corpus of 397 county websites, the study applies modern natural language processing techniques.

The analysis identifies eight key subtopics, including climate protection planning, energy consulting, and mobility transitions. It reveals pronounced spatial disparities: counties in eastern Germany are less likely to feature climate-related content overall and across selected themes. In addition, socio-demographic factors such as age structure are associated with lower levels of communication, while urban–rural differences are topic-dependent.

The paper is published as Open Access and can be accessed here.