Smart Cities Consortium Presentation on The Emotional Toll of Climate Change and COVID-19

We use natural language processing technique to construct sentiment index from social media; we link the sentiment index with extreme weather conditions and COVID-19 shocks to quantify their negative impacts on people’s expressed sentiment; we explore the heterogeneity across countries and different population groups, and the underlying mechanisms. Dr. Siqi Zheng is the Samuel Tak Lee Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Center for Real Estate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She established MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab  in 2019, and MIT China Future City Lab in 2017 (which later became the “China Future City Program” under the new Sustainable Urbanization Lab), and is the faculty director of her Lab. She is the Associate Editor of China Economic Review, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Economic Surveys, and is on the editorial board of Journal of Housing Economics and Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). Part of the Smart Cities Consortium.