climate-policy

Seven Years of 'Decarbonization' Discourse — Discontinuous Diffusion of Climate Language in Japanese Local Assemblies (2018–2024)

Using the minutes dataset built by the Machikarte Lab (covering more than one million assembly speeches as of 2024), we aggregated speeches containing climate-related terms — 'decarbonization,' 'carbon neutrality,' 'renewable energy,' 'global warming,' and 'greenhouse gas' — by year and prefecture for 2018–2024. While 'renewable energy' was already well-established in 2018, 'decarbonization' and 'carbon neutrality' show a discontinuous surge in 2021. The data reveal a structural pattern in which language spread simultaneously across local assemblies within one year of the Suga Cabinet's October 2020 declaration of carbon neutrality by 2050.