As the European Union grapples with interlinked crises, sustainability offers a framework for balancing economic stability, social equity, and environmental resilience. Policymakers, in their effort to design effective regulations, businesses to adopt greener practices, can benefit greatly from understanding people attention towards sustainability. This attention is also a key factor in influencing global efforts to combat climate change, given the EU’s role in international environmental governance. The SPES Working Paper “Public Attention Towards Sustainability in the EU: An Exploration of Google Trends Data” by SPES partners from the University of Amsterdam suggest an alternative method for conducting large-scale analysis of public attention using Google Trends.
Sustainability is a multi-dimensional concept and its definition has evolved over time to encompass several environmental, social and economic factors. Public attention to sustainability has generally increased in Europe over the past three decades. However, given the difficulty of measuring public attention towards a topic directly, most large-scale analyses of public attention to sustainability rely on media coverage as a proxy for public interest and attention.
How does the public attention towards sustainability evolve over time and across EU countries?
The analysis focuses around two main questions:
- How does the public attention towards sustainability evolve over time and across EU countries?
- What topics associated with sustainability are the most prominent within EU publics?
To answer them, Researchers suggest using data scraped by Google Trend, a service operated by Google, which offers insights into what topics attract particular interest at a given time and location, based on the relative volume of searches associated with those topics on the provider’s search engine.
In particular they opted for two classes of data:
- InterestOverTime: is a score related to the overall popularity of a search term in a specific region over time
- Top/RisingTopics: provide lists of the most popular topics and the most trending topics associated with a specific search term.
As the concept of sustainability is constantly evolving, this research approaches the notion of sustainability through the principle of “reverse black-boxing” derived from actor-network theory: considering the variability of definitions associated to the term, instead of applying existing assumptions on what sustainability means in a certain point in time and in space.
The analysis reveals a steady increase in the public interest towards sustainability since 2018, with notable regional disparities. Western European countries, particularly the Netherlands and Denmark, consistently show higher levels of engagement compared to their Eastern counterparts.
Additionally, the analysis of the topics associated with sustainability highlights the dominance of themes like Energy, Sustainable Development, and Environment, though topics related to economic and corporate issues also play a prominent role, suggesting that sustainability is often viewed through an organizational lens. Emerging topics like Fashion and declining ones like Agriculture further reflect the dynamic nature of the dimensions that users associate with sustainability.
The distribution of these topics across countries shows a general spread of common themes, but also reveals unique country-specific patterns, indicating varying levels of integration and diverse associations with sustainability across the EU.
For more details on the discussion and results
The Working Paper 4.2 “Public Attention Towards Sustainability in the EU: An Exploration of Google Trends Data” is part of the Task 4.3 “Develop innovative data collection and analysis methods to measure transition performance and to understand its determinants” / Work Package 4. The report has been written by Davide Beraldo – Researcher of the SPES project, University of Amsterdam and Nora Svensson – Researcher of the SPES project, University of Amsterdam.
