Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data - a multidisciplinary network between UK and South Korea

Climate change impacts are not only leading to physical consequences in terms of direct threats to life, infrastructure, and the natural environment, but also have profound social implications and threaten to widen existing inequalities. Climate change-related inequalities in psychosocial wellbeing (e.g., exposure to the severe distress triggered by extreme weather events, eco-anxiety of 'no future'), 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 street-view images, user-generated content, crowdsourced data, mobile phones, and social media. 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. Developing future collaborative research programmes based on this has the potential to assist in the achievement of UN's SDG 11(where inequality reduction is a core) and 13 together, which also aligns with UK and South Korea government priorities.

According to the objectives, three work packages (WP) have been allocated. Proposed tasks, and expected outputs are explained in the 'case for support' document.
1)WP1 Conduct a scoping study to refine research questions and identify relevant resources: Step one will first explore the substantial inequalities dimensions from existing national datasets, and the psychological responses to the climate crisis in different groups. Step two will investigate available emerging digital data sources and their modelling and prediction techniques. Relevant research groups around the world will be recorded in a database in order to reach wider research communities and make contact with top academics in the future to simulate new research projects.

2)WP2 Develop an understanding of information requirements in climate decision-making: Climate information users' (e.g., water managers, housing allocation planners) interpretations of climate information may differ from what climate experts aim to communicate. A one-day hybrid workshop will be held with researchers, climate information providers and users to identify and understand the gap between the information communication of climate change and the requirements in decision making in climate practice and policy, the economic barriers and hidden costs caused by climate change's impact on wellbeing. The experience, best practice, and data interfaces in climate communication in the two countries will be compared and discussed, which will help to increase awareness and share effective interventions to respond to the psychosocial impacts of climate change.

3)WP3 Exchange researchers between the UK and South Korea and support ECRs: Staffs and ECRs from each side will conduct several short visits to each country, for research presentations, brainstorming and discussions. Especially, training programmes will be designed to support ECRs, which helps to build the long-term collaborations between the UK and South Korea groups. Remote discussions, meetings, and seminars will also be conducted via online platforms throughout the whole project period.