The United Nations (UN) is using popular social networking site Twitter to track trending news and tweets regarding climate change, according to Tech Times.
According to the UN, climate change has become a global issue that's being discussed in both news outlets and social media. The organization hopes its latest project will increase people's awareness about the environmental issue.
"Climate Change is an issue of ever increasing significance to both policy makers and the public, especially as the impact of climate change on global and local economies has become clear," the organization said on the UN Global Pulse site.
"People care about this critical issue, and this interest is reflected in news headlines and across global social media," UN added.
For this project, the UN partnered with Global Pulse to create an online dashboard to monitor the tweets.
UN's search procedure involves keeping track of key words related to environment, oceans, energy and forestry. The data collected are then displayed on a world map based on the general locations of the conversations, according to NBC News.
"This tool analyzes millions of tweets in English, Spanish and French to look at both volume and content of online conversations which include climate change related keywords," UN stated.
"In other words, how much people are talking about climate change and in what contexts," it added. "Understanding how people around the world are discussing climate change helps reveal in real time what's most pertinent for media, advocacy groups and decision makers," it continued.
Currently, the Climate Monitoring Dashboard displays data collected from April to September of this year. Each week, the dashboard will be updated to reflect fresh trending topics.
"The tool updates on a weekly basis to reflect topics and top hashtags on Twitter, most tweeted links, and key influencers, sentiment, most popular tweets and online search volumes using Google Trends," UN stated.