Environmental Sustainability assessment 2.0: The value of social media data for determining the emotional responses of people to river pollution—A case study of Weibo (Chinese Twitter)

Urban river pollution has brought about serious challenges to residents in terms of bodily health and emotional well-being. Based on a social media platform, Chinese Twitter (Weibo), this paper proposes a research framework to investigate the emotional responses of people according to four dimensions: trends, seasons, space and dynamics (TSSD). This study presents several important findings. First, negative responses were much more common than positive ones across all seasons, 22.8% and 9.2%, respectively, which means that river pollution adversely affects residents' well-being in general. Second, negative responses are likely related to local garbage piles, landslides, heavy rains, traffic jams, and demolition, while positive reactions are likely related to beautiful weather or spending time with family members. Third, summer and winter are more likely to induce negative emotions than spring and autumn, with the negative index of summer or winter approaching 80%. This study confirmed that social media data are of great value in measuring the behaviors and emotional responses of humans to their surrounding environment.