Climate change poses an urgent threat to America’s welfare and yet most Americans are largely unaware of the facts around climate change and its potential impacts. This ignorance is due to a number of factors including social norms, scientific illiteracy, lack of information, and a presence of misinformation.
A representative survey study conducted out of Yale and George Mason University to examine the American public’s knowledge and beliefs around climate change classified the population into 6 broad audiences: The alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. Each audience responds to the issue of climate change in a different way, ranging from taking direct action to reduce production of greenhouse gases in the alarmed category through to actively opposing action to reduce production of greenhouse gases amongst the dismissive. It was found that approximately 49% of respondents sat between cautious and dismissive. Of the entire sample, only the 18% of respondents in the alarmed category were motivated enough to take personal action against climate change and support aggressive policy action. Respondents in categories from cautious to dismissive were much less likely to support any government action to address climate change.
This has tremendous implications for policymakers. Even though the majority of Americans believe that climate change is real, the majority also believe that it does not pose a substantial and urgent threat, and that government should not adopt aggressive policy to address it. Attitudes are particularly unsupportive amongst demographics that are more religious and more politically right-leaning.
The least supportive of climate change initiatives also tend to either not seek out information on climate change or to distrust mainstream media, environmental groups, and other scientific sources. This poses another challenge for policymakers – how can these groups be educated on the facts of climate change if they are not responsive to conventional messaging strategies?
It is within the mission statement of the EPA to effectively supply information sufficient to enable all sectors of society to meaningfully engage in the management of environmental risks and to be active in environmental education initiatives. As a longstanding environmental authority in United States, the EPA is particularly well positioned to build effective engagement programs and resource materials for passive consumption and active dissemination.
It has become increasingly clear that communicating the scientific facts alone is insufficient to engage motivate audiences toward climate action. Evidence suggests that in order for climate science to be effectively interpreted by most audiences, an effort must be made to present a psychologically appealing narrative with an emphasis on relatable experience balanced with scientific facts. In order for communication to be effective, the message, method, and mode of communication must be tailored to the target audience while also taking into account the typical biases and barriers to effective scientific communication.
Interestingly, those who are most skeptical about the impact or existence of climate change also reported high levels of self-assessed knowledge on climate change and reported that they were very unlikely to change their minds. This means that beyond informing the public, policymakers must also be engaged in changing strongly held beliefs; a complex task requiring sophisticated communications strategies that go far beyond conventional methods.
In the United States, the demographic with the lowest belief in the existence and/or significance of climate change are relatively highly paid and highly educated Christian white males. It follows that based on their social status, this group also holds a disproportionately large amount of social influence. Although targeting the staunchest opponents to climate action may seem like vain pursuit, the relatively high social influence in this group may lead to a multiplier effect for opinion change.
The insights from behavioural sciences that could be used to best engage with the most climate sceptical could also readily be applied to the large number of Americans who are cognisant of climate change but are not yet willing to change their behaviour or support political climate action. This perhaps would have a larger initial effect on public engagement with climate change in other categories such as the climate cautious to the climate dismissive, however the cumulative effect would likely be greater than that achieved by targeting the intermediate categories alone.
The EPA is also a major source of funding for a wide range of environmental interest groups. By strategically directing grant funding or creating new grants or incentives, the EPA could influence other key actors to incorporate insights from the behavioural sciences into their communications and engagement strategies.
The value of creating more sophisticated and compelling communication is not limited to mobilizing the public, but is also instrumental in engaging key policy and decision makers across political lines.
The EPA plays a central role in informing key policymakers on environmental issues. By incorporating insights from the behavioural sciences into policymaker-facing communications and encouraging policymakers to incorporate the same strategies, the EPA could better support environmental advocacy across government.
