Twitter Looks to Boost Climate Change Discussion Ahead of World Environment Day

With World Environment Day coming up this weekend (6/5), Twitter has announced a new Climate Change topic for users to follow, to help keep them informed of the latest updates, while its also announced new partnerships and programs to do its part in addressing environmental concerns in various ways.

As explained by Twitter:

“This week, we took additional steps to better serve the climate conversation happening across Twitter. We know that people use the service to find credible information during global crises. Starting this week, you can follow the Climate Change Topic to find personalized conversations about climate change, including Tweets from environmental and sustainability organizations, environmental activists, and scientists. These Tweets will appear right in your home timeline when you follow the Topic.”

Part of Twitter’s ongoing efforts to expand user horizons in the app, the platform continues to expand its topic listings, with more than 7,000 curated topics now available to follow in the app. The idea is that this will help users find more content relevant to their interests, as opposed to simply following individual users, while topics can also, at least in theory, make it a little easier for new Twitter users to find tweets of interest that they can add into their streams.

The new Climate Change topic, which you can follow here, will be overseen by Twitter’s moderators, which should ensure the most relevant tweets are filtered through to users.

In addition to this, Twitter’s also allocating new #AdsForGood grants to environmental causes, in partnership with a range of organizations, including the Earth Day Network, the United Nations (UN) Environment Programme, Voice for the Planet, WWF and others.

Twitter’s has also reiterated its own commitment to reducing its carbon impact:

“We continue to work toward our goal of achieving 100% carbon-neutral power sourcing in our current data centers by the end of 2022. We’ve partnered with Cool Effect, a nonprofit organization that helps offset emissions from our data centers and employee travel, to fund green projects around the world. So far, 92% of our global offices have achieved the “Green Building Certified” standard, with more to come.”

Climate change remains a key topic of focus, and while it has, understandably, taken a backseat as we battle through the pandemic, the focus will soon turn back to environmental issues, and how we can, and should, do more to address such concerns. 

As such, World Environment Day serves as a good reminder of the situation, and what needs to be discussed, and it’s good to see Twitter working to help people get more information, and expand informed conversation within the app.