NLP4Climate: Research Community for NLP in the Climate Domain
NLP4Climate is an international research community for people working at the intersection of natural language processing and climate change. Over more than two years it has brought together researchers from academia, think tanks, and applied organisations who share a common challenge: making sense of the vast and growing body of climate-relevant text.
The community was founded by Tobias Schimanski, Kalyan Dutia and others, and is now run as a collaboration between Climate+Tech and Climate Policy Radar.
What Draws People Together
Climate-related text is everywhere—policy documents, sustainability reports, news, scientific literature, social media, lobbying disclosures, corporate filings. NLP has real potential to help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners understand this landscape at scale. But the problems are genuinely hard: domain-specific language, multilingual corpora, annotation challenges, evaluation gaps, and the need to connect text analysis to real-world decisions.
NLP4Climate exists to bring people with these shared problems into regular contact with each other.
Community Activities
Monthly calls provide a regular rhythm for the community—short updates, presented work, discussion of ongoing research, and coordination on shared interests. They are open to everyone in the community and have been running consistently for more than two years.
The Slack community is where most day-to-day exchange happens. Topic-based channels, focus group channels, and general discussion make it the main connective tissue of the network.
Talks are a regular feature—community members and external speakers present work in progress, new datasets, tools, and findings. If you have something relevant to share, the community is open to it.
Focus sessions and get-togethers complement the monthly calls: smaller, focused working sessions where researchers with overlapping interests can go deeper. They also serve a social function—building the kind of trust and familiarity that makes genuine collaboration possible.
Focus Groups
Focus groups are the community’s mechanism for collaborative work. They are deliberately self-organised: anyone can start a group, and anyone can join one. There is no formal process—post in the Slack, start a channel, and get going.
The idea is to create smaller contexts where people can:
- discuss the details of a specific problem
- learn from each other’s approaches
- help each other with datasets, methods, or reviews
- work on joint research or open-source tools
Focus groups can meet regularly or on demand, depending on what works for the people involved. Public Slack channels are encouraged so the broader community can follow along.
Current active topics include:
| Topic | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Sustainability Report Analysis | ESG, CSRD, disclosure extraction |
| Claim Verification | Fact-checking, climate misinformation |
| Climate Knowledge Graphs | Structured knowledge, ontologies |
| Local Climate Plan Analysis | Topic models, text mining |
| News Article Analysis | Framing, conflicts, social dilemmas |
| Lobbying and Stance Detection | Political stance, influence detection |
These topics emerged from discussions in the community—they reflect where the research energy is. If you do not see your area listed, that is not a barrier: the community is open to new topics and new groups at any time.
Get Involved
Use Register at the top or bottom of this page.
Questions: Christian Wörle (Climate+Tech).
Monthly Community Calls
Regular calls where researchers share updates, present work, and coordinate across topics. Open to everyone in the community.
Slack Community
An active Slack workspace for day-to-day discussion, announcements, and coordination across topics and focus groups.
Talks and Presentations
The community is open to talks on relevant research—ongoing work, datasets, tools, and findings from across the NLP+climate space.
Focus Sessions and Get-Togethers
Smaller, topic-driven sessions where researchers working on similar problems can go deeper together. Also informal get-togethers for the broader community.
Shared Projects
The community aims to facilitate collaborative research and open-source tools. Focus groups are the usual starting point for this kind of joint work.
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Self-organised, open collaboration
Focus Group Topics
Anyone can start a group. Anyone can join one.
ESG disclosures, sustainability reporting standards, automated extraction and evaluation of corporate climate commitments.
Detecting and verifying climate-related claims in media, corporate communications, and public discourse.
Structured knowledge representation for climate science, policy, and actors—enabling richer retrieval and reasoning.
Topic models, text mining, and NLP methods applied to municipal and national climate plans.
Identifying conflicts, social dilemmas, and frames in climate-related news coverage.
Detecting political stance, lobbying language, and influence patterns in climate-relevant texts.
Extracting structured findings, methods, and evidence from the scientific climate literature at scale.
RAG systems, document parsing, vector databases, and NLP infrastructure for climate applications.
Identifying misleading or unsubstantiated environmental claims in corporate and media communications.
Tracking climate narratives, coordinated campaigns, and disinformation patterns across social platforms.