Executive Climate Change Attention: Toward an Indicator of Comparative Climate Change Attention

Abstract This article introduces the Executive Climate Change Attention indicator. This unique comparative measure assesses the importance given to climate change by executives in a total of 195 countries since 1985 through their annual individual government speeches at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). To compute this indicator, we trained a transformer model to classify sentences related to climate change in the government speeches at the UNGA. We illustrate the usefulness of the indicator by examining the drivers of climate change attention at the UNGA and the link between climate change attention and national climate policy outcomes.