Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new article, “Climate change messages can promote support for climate action globally” in the journal Global Environmental Change. This study was a collaboration between YPCCC and Potential Energy.

Some climate messages may perform better or worse in different countries. We conducted an online experiment with 57,968 participants across 23 countries, testing the impacts of three climate messages. The “Urgency & Generational” message emphasized climate change and extreme weather as an urgent threat (“here and now”). The “Polluter Accountability” message emphasized climate change as a responsibility and fairness issue. The “Climate Progress” message primarily emphasized climate change solutions. We found all three messages had positive effects on support for climate action.

The “Urgency & Generational” message had the strongest effect overall. On average, it had stronger effects in countries with lower baseline support for climate action (e.g., developed countries).

The “urgency and generational” message:

You don’t have to be a scientist to see how our climate has changed.

Extreme weather events, like extreme heat waves, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and drought, are becoming more frequent and more severe. The last eight years were the hottest ever recorded in human history. 

Our overheating planet is already putting lives and livelihoods at risk. It’s hurting our farmers, over-polluting our cities, reducing our water supply, and costing us billions in damage from extreme weather.

Most importantly, it’s putting our children’s futures at risk. It’s our responsibility to leave behind a safe, livable world for future generations. 

If we don’t stop polluting, it will only get worse. Carbon pollution stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, so the effects cannot be reversed. 

Yet, today, the world continues to emit more heat-trapping carbon pollution than ever. It’s cooking the planet. 

We need immediate action on climate change, because later is too late.

Importantly, although the size of the effect varied across countries, effects were either positive or non-significant across all audience subgroups. In other words, we found no backfire effects. Additionally, both the “Urgency & Generational” and “Polluter Accountability” messages had the strongest positive effects across the political spectrum, while the “Climate Progress” message was slightly more positive for people on the political Right (and nonsignificant for moderates and people on the Left).

Although the average message effects were moderate, the results indicate that, when deployed at a large scale and repeated often, climate change messages have the potential to substantially strengthen public support for climate action.

You can read the full article, which contains many other findings, here.