DutchClimateRelevance
A binary text classifier that labels Dutch parliamentary motion text as
climate-relevant or not. The positive class aggregates the climate,
energy, and agriculture policy domains. The model is fine-tuned from
RobBERT v2
(Delobelle et al., 2020), a Dutch RoBERTa-based language model, on a
labelled sample of Dutch parliamentary text drawn from the ParlaMint
corpus.
It was developed to isolate climate-relevant parliamentary motions from a
larger collection of Dutch parliamentary documents, as the first stage of
a longitudinal study of climate framing in Dutch politics.
Labels
| ID | Label | Meaning |
|---|
| 0 | not_relevant | Not related to climate, energy, or agriculture |
| 1 | climate_agriculture_energy | Related to climate, energy, or agriculture policy |
Performance
Evaluated on a held-out test set (n = 2,761):
| Metric | Value |
|---|
| Accuracy | 0.95 |
| F1 (climate-relevant class) | 0.86 |
| Precision (climate-relevant) | 0.86 |
| Recall (climate-relevant) | 0.86 |
| Macro F1 | 0.92 |
Usage
1from transformers import pipeline
2
3clf = pipeline(
4 "text-classification",
5 model="niekbiesterbos/robbert-dutch-climate-relevance",
6)
7
8clf("De regering moet de uitstoot van broeikasgassen sneller terugdringen.")
9# [{'label': 'climate_agriculture_energy', 'score': 0.99}]
Intended use and limitations
The model is designed for filtering Dutch parliamentary motions and debate
text for climate relevance. It is trained on the formal register of
parliamentary documents (motions, debates), and performance on other
domains such as news articles or social media is untested. The
climate-relevant class deliberately aggregates climate, energy, and
agriculture, so texts dealing only with energy or agriculture without an
explicit climate dimension are also labelled relevant.
Training data
A labelled sample of Dutch parliamentary text from the ParlaMint corpus
(Erjavec et al., 2025), with policy-topic labels following the Comparative
Agendas Project taxonomy aggregated into a single climate-relevant
category. Labels were iteratively refined through error analysis, excluding
topically adjacent but non-climate categories such as fisheries, animal
welfare, and earthquake damage.
Citation
Developed as part of the MSc thesis "From Rhetoric to Action: Climate
Framing in Dutch Politics (2008-2025)", University of Groningen, 2026.
1@mastersthesis{biesterbos2026rhetoric,
2 title = {From Rhetoric to Action: Climate Framing in Dutch Politics (2008--2025)},
3 author = {Biesterbos, Niek},
4 school = {University of Groningen},
5 year = {2026},
6}