RESEARCH PROJECT

Algorithms and meaning-making on the environment

Updated: June 2025

Project overview

Project manager: Malte Rödl
Cooperators:

Participants

Project members:
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Short summary

An overview of collective research on how algorithms shape our societal capacity to engage with the ongoing environmental crises.

Algorithms are an essential part of our increasingly digitised lives. For example, as part of AI chatbots, search engines, or social media platforms, algorithms filter, select and sort information. Just like human communications, algorithmic systems always favour certain perspectives over others, and are not neutral. Instead, they reproduce society through the assumptions built in by developers and the data used to develop and train them. As algorithms are increasingly part of people’s everyday lives, they contribute to how people and societies understand and create meaning on the environment and on how different environmental crises ought to be addressed. Algorithms have implications for societal discourses, norms, and social practices and their environmental connotations.

The concepts of algorithmically embodied emissions and algorithmically facilitated emissions are attempts to conceptualise how the various choices facilitated by algorithmic systems as they are deployed by multi-sided platforms, such as commercial search engines or various social media and recommender systems, contribute to climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental destruction. 

Publications in the project

Haider, J., Rödl, M. & Joosse, S. (2022). Algorithmically embodied emissions: The environmental harm of everyday life information in digital culture. Information Research, 27, colis2224. https://doi.org/10.47989/colis2224

Rödl, M., & Haider, J. (2022). Internet search results could be increasing your carbon emissions. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/internet-search-results-could-be-increasing-your-carbon-emissions-194334

Haider, J., & Rödl, M. (2023). Algorithmically embodied emissions: Algorithmic harm and climate change. In: Data & Society: Points. Part of The Social Life of Algorithmic Harms essay series, edited by Jacob Metcalf, Emanuel Moss, and Ranjit Singh. https://points.datasociety.net/algorithmically-embodied-emissions-algorithmic-harm-and-climate-change-e2617eb4770d

Climate change denial is not very widespread in Sweden, but how does it appear more popular? Following the traces of appeals to “please google” (“googla gärna”) a specific term, in this project we investigate how climate deniers’ appeals to people to "do their own research" proliferate through online and offline media. These carefully curated terms are meant to sow doubt onto scientific consensus and create the illusion of a much broader support for climate denial in Sweden than there actually is.

Publications in the project

Haider, J. (2024). AI-Powered Web Search Gives Climate Deniers and Conspiracy Theorists Free Rein. Tech Policy Press. https://techpolicy.press/ai-powered-web-search-gives-climate-deniers-and-conspiracy-theorists-free-rein

Rödl, M. B., & Haider, J. (2025). “Google this!” How performative links and search engines organise climate obstruction networks. Information, Communication & Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2445640

This Formas-funded project “Creating meaning on the climate crisis: An investigation of commercial algorithms as communication participants” (2023–2026) examines how information infrastructures such as Google, Facebook et al contribute to creating meaning on the climate crisis. These algorithmic information systems, including their underlying AI models and algorithmic designs, are invisible but omnipresent communication participants in today´s society. They filter, select and sort information, making decisions about visibility and relevance.

Algorithmic information systems, e.g. commercial search engines or social media, but also citizen science apps, contribute to what we know and how we know it, but also to what is unknown, silenced and invisible. This project examines some of the ways in which such ignorances and absences related to the climate and other environmental crises are created and maintained and places them in a wider theoretical and societal context.

As part of this project, we hosted two combined public symposia and academic workshops under the title of “Networked Silences: Algorithms & meaning-making in times of climate change.” They were held in October 2022 at SLU Uppsala and in October 2023 in collaboration with AI Lund at Lund University.

Publications in the project

Haider, J., & Rödl, M. (2023). Google Search and the creation of ignorance: The case of the climate crisis. Big Data & Society, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231158997

Haider, J., Rödl, M., & Joosse, S. (2022, Oct 6). Miljökrisens stora allvar döljs av algoritmer [The seriousness of the environmental crisis is hidden by algorithms]. Uppsala Nya Tidning, 4. https://www.unt.se/debatt/artikel/miljokrisens-stora-allvar-doljs-av-algoritmer/r95xpmmj

This project provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how (dis/mis)information about sustainable energy initiatives is configured in society's dominant information infrastructures. It examines how information about wind power in Sweden is made visible and invisible on social media and in search engines and how it is related to other issues. It further asks what this means for the public understanding of the problem space configured around the issue of sustainable energy. 

The team also includes Elisa Tattersall-Wallin, Björn Ekström, and David Gunnarsson Lorentzen (all at SSLIS, the Swedish School of Library and Information Science) and Nora Söderberg (at SLU).

Publications in the project

Final project report:
Haider, J., Ekström, B., Tattersall Wallin, E., Gunnarsson Lorentzen, D., Rödl, M. & Söderberg, N. (2023). Tracing online information about wind power in Sweden: An exploratory quantitative study of broader trends. https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-29496

Björn Ekström and Elisa Tattersall-Wallin published an academic paper on the collected data from Google Search:

Ekström, B. & Tattersall Wallin, E. (2023). Simple questions for complex matters? An enquiry into Swedish Google search queries on wind power. Nordic Journal of Library and Information Studies, 4(1), 34-50. https://doi.org/10.7146/njlis.v4i1.136246

Online platforms are an increasingly important way to identify, find out about, and conduct nature experiences. Yet, platforms also shape how people talk about and communicate about nature experiences—for example, through influencer culture, or the desire for social recognition. Thereby, platforms and their user-created content affect public societal ideas about ‘good’ or ‘desirable’ engagements with nature. Selfies taken in nature are one such instance, where the online shapes our understanding of outdoor spaces: nature is presented as a backdrop to individual identity performances, as pristine, tidy, and removed from civilisation.

Publications in the project

Rödl, M., Haider, J., & Joosse, S. (2023). The quest for “nature” in selfies: How platforms shape nature/society relationships. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 67(9), 1928–1951. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2023.2265548

An artistic video based on the publication was produced by Dutch filmmaker Tessa Joosse and shown at the exhibition “Moulding Nature” at Färgfabriken in Stockholm. It can be viewed on their website.

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