Climate and environmental attention: a news-based composite indicator

The way people perceive the risks associated with climate change is influenced by scientific research, social awareness, and by media representation Boykoff [2011]. The effects of perception of climate risk extend beyond Environmental concerns and permeate decision-making processes in both economic and social policy.
We believe that a composite index to measure climate attention, if well-constructed and robust, can provide valuable insights for policymakers and serve as a leading indicator in macroeconomic and financial analysis [Luxon, 2019]. The composite indicator proposed in this article is based on a novel methodology that evaluates the semantic relevance, and not the favorability, of selected keywords, each of them provided with a semantic score, based both on the number of appearances and on the interconnectedness with other words in the text corpus.
Finally, the Benefit of the Doubt (BoD) aggregation strategy is adopted that takes advantage of a time-varying optimal weighting scheme. The index is compared to alternative approaches.