Reflections Seven Years on From the First Declaration of Climate Emergency: Large-Scale Text Analysis of Local Government Climate Policy in Australia

Abstract

Seven years on from the first declaration of climate emergency, we will undertake a large-scale text analysis of local government climate strategy documents of 196 climate policies over 140 local governments in Australia from 2016 to the end of 2022. We aim to ascertain whether we have witnessed a shift in the policy response from ‘business as usual’ towards a new emergency mode of climate governance. We focus on Australia as the home to the first declaration of climate emergency from local government. We utilise topic modelling to depict the commonalities and divergences of key topics/themes in the climate policies of local government in Australia to map these key topics against a framework that identifies key attributes of climate emergency policy framing mode. The size of our dataset enables us to draw conclusions, although limited to Australia, and we conclude that local governments that did declare a climate emergency have a higher presence of the attributes of climate emergency mode. Key to note is the presence of topics for the attributes of urgency of action, prioritisation of action, and social mobilisation points to a move away from business as usual to accelerated climate action in local governments that declared a climate emergency.