Xingjie Wei and Andrea Taylor - Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data

Xingjie Wei (PI) and Andrea Taylor (Co-I) will lead an ESRC-funded project 'Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data - a multidisciplinary network between UK and South Korea' with Co-Is Jooyoung Jeon, Hyungjun Kim and Jiho Cha from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in the South Korea. Based on building a network of multidisciplinary researchers between the UK and the South Korea, this project will investigate the effect of climate change on psychosocial wellbeing inequalities with emerging sources of digital data. Each side will contribute to this network with complementary expertise in climate adaption, risk communication, health inequality, data modelling and machine learning.

Climate change-related inequalities in psychosocial wellbeing, are relatively difficult to analyse directly because they are typically ‘inner’ (e.g., subjective experiences and feelings) at the individual level. Recent developments in social data science and machine learning techniques, mean the disproportionate effect of climate change on different vulnerable groups can be measured and tracked using emerging sources of digital data such as social media data. These new data sources contain patterns of various human behaviours in vulnerable people, which can be utilised to infer individual differences in psychosocial wellbeing. This data makes it feasible to understand how and to what extent climate change exacerbates social inequalities by affecting psychosocial wellbeing, and what protective factors and support requirements are needed. It also provides a new lens to study and address climate change and psychosocial wellbeing inequality within a uniform data environment and technique framework.