Climate Change Representation in IPCC Reports and Wikipedia: A Comparative Analysis Through Natural Language Processing

Master’s Thesis : Climate Change Representation in IPCC Reports and Wikipedia: A Comparative Analysis Through Natural Language Processing This thesis presents a comparative Natural Language Processing analysis of theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III Summaries forPolicymakers and corresponding versions of Wikipedia’s "Climate Change Mitigation" (CCM)article. Using a comprehensive range of NLP techniques, including lexicometry, stylistic,readability assessments, modality analysis, semantic similarity (Sentence BERT), topicmodelling (BERTopic), sentiment and emotion detection, and Named Entity Recognition, thestudy explores how CCM is portrayed across these two sources between 1990 and 2022.The findings show that IPCC SPMs consistently maintain a high level of technicality andWikipedia, while initially more accessible and focused on events and personalities, hasgradually aligned both semantically and stylistically with the IPCC. The analysis reveals noevidence of deliberate bias in Wikipedia’s representation of climate change mitigation.Instead, differences in framing and focus reflect its role as a publicly edited resourceintended for a general audience. The study concludes that Wikipedia plays an important andevolving role in supporting public understanding of climate change, increasingly reflecting theIPCC’s scientific assessments.