Advocates of climate action? The age of members of parliament and their activity in legislative debates on climate change

Abstract

Parliamentary debates are an important stage in the process of designing new policies and play an important role for discussing the policy reactions to exogenous events like the COVID-19 pandemic or long-term developments like climate change. We combine theories on vote-seeking strategies of political actors with theoretical accounts that highlight the impact of personal characteristics of politicians and argue that in particular younger Members of Parliament (MPs) should put more emphasis on issues related to climate change and its consequences than older MPs. We test our hypotheses on the basis of an original dataset covering all parliamentary debates that focus on issues related to climate change in the German Bundestag from 2013 until 2021, thus concentrating on a time period when climate change became a highly salient issue among the German public. We find that the age of MPs matters: the younger MPs are, the more speeches they contribute to parliamentary debates related to climate policy. Graphical Abstract

Elite Speech about Climate Change: Analysis of Sentiment from the United Nations Conference of Parties, 1995–2021

“…Besides addressing these limitations, future research might also incorporate text from other relevant forums, for example to see whether the ways that a country's representative expresses themselves relates to the ways that politicians discuss climate change within their country (e.g., in parliamentary debates). Other researchers have studied the ways that politicians have discussed climate change in their own country (e.g., frequency of climate change speeches by German members of parliament [71]) or continent (e.g., arguments for and against climate change action in the European Parliament [72]). Because the COP statements identify the specific speaker, it would be interesting to see whether we could create a corpus of parallel statements about climate change by the same speakers in the same timeframes, to compare how they express themselves when communicating about it within their own nation, both to other politicians and to the public, rather than on a world stage.…”

The Insurance Industry's Adaptation Practice to Climate Change

“…They are willing to take clear and bold actions to promote positive advancement towards their goals. In the context of climate change, it has become increasingly crucial for industries like insurance that stand at the front line of environmental impact to lead by example as advocates for sustainability (Debus & Himmelrath, 2022). Table 3 summarises the codes of the insurers' climate activities, key practices, and associated peer-reviewed articles for climate change advocates.…”

“…Debus & Himmelrath, 2022;Jiang et al, 2023;Surminski et al, 2022). As a result, insurance companies lobbying policymakers will remain for the long term.…”

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“…They are willing to take clear and bold actions to promote positive advancement towards their goals. In the context of climate change, it has become increasingly crucial for industries like insurance that stand at the front line of environmental impact to lead by example as advocates for sustainability (Debus & Himmelrath, 2022). Table 3 summarises the codes of the insurers' climate activities, key practices, and associated peer-reviewed articles for climate change advocates.…”

“…Table 3 summarises the codes of the insurers' climate activities, key practices, and associated peer-reviewed articles for climate change advocates. The top five codes were kept from Mills' ( 2009) study, which suggests that engaging in governmental policies (Debus & Himmelrath, 2022;Jiang et al, 2023;Surminski et al, 2022), advertising on loss prevention (Wang et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2021), promoting exemplars (Gatzert et al, 2020;Sato & Seki, 2010), investments in solutions and disclosing climate risks (Braun et al, 2019;Isaac & Acheampong, 2021;Mittal et al, 2021) are still prevalent practice for the insurance industry. A new code, incorporating the ESG agenda (Brogi et al, 2022;Kushwah & Mathur, 2022;Stricker et al, 2022), emerged from the later research.…”