JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

As communities adapt to climate change, insight is needed to understand how their priorities and policy roadmaps align. However, manual identification and review of all communication materials can be a roadblock to this goal. To design and deploy a semi-automated search framework to extract information from municipal climate change reports, allowing us to summarize prioritized hazards and outreach strategies in a defined study area and examine variation among municipalities in this area. We gathered municipal reports related to climate action or hazard mitigation published between 2017 and 2024 across 21 cities and towns in the Greater Boston Inner Core. We supplemented a manual search with a semi-automated search procedure for documents containing keywords such as “flooding”, “extreme heat”, and “toxics.” We identified 123 reports that reflected concerns for municipalities, calculated the percent of terms within each report that relate to a series of hazards and community outreach strategies, and summarized these within-report values overall and by municipality. Among hazards, flooding and storms were mentioned in nearly all reports (97.6% for both) and were the most common keywords within reports (median per-report percent of hazard terms was 44.7% and 29.1%, respectively. Among outreach strategies, surveys and community meetings were the most common, appearing in 94.3% and 78.0% reports respectively. Reported hazards were consistent across municipalities, while outreach strategies varied among them. Similarities and differences across municipal priorities for climate change reinforce the need for local information gathering and syntheses across neighboring communities, which can be informed by a scalable, semi-automated analytic approach.