Jakob Lochner

Societal attention has a major influence on political decisions, for example on climate protection and adaptation measures. However, attention is not constantly high, but fluctuates between high and low phases, in so-called attention cycles. In addition, growing accustomed to climate impacts, such as very hot and dry summers, can lead to reduced attention and thus potentially to insufficient climate protection measures.

I am investigating attention cycles on climate change and especially on weather extremes by means of a systematic and quantitative analysis of media coverage. My analysis focuses on the medium "newspaper" and I prepare, classify and statistically analyse newspaper archive data. In doing so, I approximate public attention by the number of topic-specific press articles, a well-established procedure in the literature.

Lochner*, J. H./Donges*, J. F., Kitzmann, N. H., Heitzig, J., Lehmann, S., Wiedermann, M., and Vollmer, J. (2021). Dose-response functions and surrogate models for exploring social contagion in the Copenhagen Networks Study. European Physical Journal Special Topics 230, 3311–3334 (2021), DOI: 10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00279-7. * shared lead authorship.

I am authoring a weekly (german only) newsletter on climate politics: Klimahochdrei