Abstract:
Social media and climate change are some of the most controversial issues of
the 21st century. Despite numerous studies, our understanding of current social
media trends, popular hot topics, and future challenges related to climate change
remains significantly limited. This research presents a systematic review of climate
change and social media for the first time. Review the studies published between
2009 and 2022 in places like Google Scholar, Science Direct, Web-of-Science,
Scopus, ResearchGate, and others. For this systematic review, we found 1,057
articles. Forty-five articles were the most relevant according to our goals and
study design, which followed the PRISMA framework. The results of this review
demonstrate that Twitter is the most popular platform. Every year, we identify
rising trends in the number of publications. Past studies often focused on just one
social media site, like Twitter (n = 26) or Facebook (n = 5). Although most studies
focus on the United States, the study area is primarily “all over the world.” This
study offers a theoretical framework by examining the relationship between social
media platforms and the discourse surrounding climate change. It looked into
how social media trends influence public perception, raise awareness, and spur
action on climate change. In practical terms, the study focuses on important and
trending topics like nonbelievers and climate change. The contribution consists
of synthesizing the body of research, providing insights into the state of the
digital world, and suggesting future lines of inquiry for the field of social media
and climate change studies. We highlighted the studies’ quality assessment result
of “moderate quality.” This systematic review provides information about how
climate change is now portrayed on social media and lays the groundwork for
further study in this area.
