Collaborating with climate justice practitioners, we conducted a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (n = 1,011) to measure and explore predictors of Americans’ climate justice beliefs and intentions to engage in related behaviors. We find that only about one-third of Americans have heard of climate justice, but about half of Americans support climate justice goals once they are explained. Support for climate justice is predicted by many factors, including views about global warming, perceptions of climate and racial injustice, cultural worldviews, and demographics including racial identity, gender, and political party/ideology. Our study suggests a need to build public awareness of the term “climate justice,” the disproportionate harms of climate change, and how climate justice initiatives will address these harms. Our study also illustrates how researchers might incorporate practitioner perspectives in national and international studies on climate justice.

Climate change communication campaigns can reach many audiences cost-effectively. However, some climate messages may not work universally as there may be heterogeneity in message effects across audiences. An online experiment (N = 57,968) across 23 countries found that three climate messages had modest positive effects on support for climate action. An "Urgency & Generational" message had the strongest effect overall and had, on average, stronger effects in countries with lower baseline support for climate action (e.g., developed countries, democratic countries). While the size of this message's positive effects varied across countries, effects were positive across all audience subgroups investigated and there was no evidence of backfire effects. For instance, this message had positive effects across the political spectrum and effects were marginally stronger among the political Right. Although the average message effects were small, the results indicate that, when deployed at a large scale, climate change messages have the potential to strengthen public support for climate action.

The mental health impacts of climate change are increasingly documented; however, less research has investigated the relationship between climate change-related psychological distress and engagement with the issue. The results from two national probability samples of U.S. adults show that 16% report at least one feature of climate change psychological distress and that certain groups have higher levels of distress than others (e.g., Hispanic/Latinos, lower income adults, younger adults). Importantly, people experiencing distress are more likely to engage in collective action on climate change or express a willingness to do so, even when controlling for several correlates of environmental behavior (e.g., political ideology, collective efficacy beliefs). These findings highlight that many Americans are experiencing psychological distress from climate change, and those who do are more involved in collective climate action. People experiencing such distress may benefit from resources to support mental health and engagement with climate change.

As climate change impacts increase, communicators must engage as many audiences as possible in climate action. One potentially underrated audience is video gamers. Two-thirds of Americans play video games, and video games are a potentially effective climate change communication tool. However, little research has examined whether video gamers have unique value as a target audience for climate communication, and if they do, what might be effective ways to reach them. To address this need, we use two surveys including self-identified video game players in the United States to measure their current engagement with climate change, including through video gaming. In Study 1, a nationally representative survey in the United States (N = 1,006), we found that being a video gamer was slightly positively associated with intentions to take collective action on global warming. In Study 2, restricted to gamers in the United States (N = 2,034), we found that having more friends and family who played video games, and/or being exposed to global warming content in gaming, were also positively associated with collective action intentions. These findings were consistent even after controlling for potential confounding variables such as age, political party, and global warming attitudes. Results suggest that video gamers are a worthwhile potential audience for future climate change communication, combatting the stereotype of video gamers as disengaged or antisocial, at least in the context of climate change. Our study also identifies several potential avenues for future communication with video gamers, particularly outreach to and engagement with gaming communities.

Building public consensus about the threat of climate change is critical for enacting meaningful action to address it. To understand how Americans are changing their beliefs about climate change, research typically relies on cross-sectional survey responses. Data that is collected from the same individuals over time– panel data– provides clearer evidence about whether people’s beliefs are shifting. In this article, we investigate changes in climate beliefs among the American public using panel data from 2,135 survey respondents, analyzing opinion changes through the “Global Warming’s Six Americas” framework– an audience segmentation tool that identifies the people who are the most worried about global warming (the Alarmed) to the least worried (the Dismissive). Our findings indicate that many Americans are changing their minds about climate change and becoming more worried over time, and that these shifts correlate with changes in support for climate policy and behavioral engagement. However, these trends vary within key segments of the population and indicate that while climate communication may be shifting the beliefs of many, strategies for reaching particular audiences may need to be adapted.

ABSTRACT Literary works of fiction about climate change are becoming more common and more popular among critics and readers. While much research has indicated the persuasive effectiveness of narrative storytelling in general, empirical research has not yet tested the effects of reading climate fiction. This paper reports results from the first experimental study to test the immediate and delayed impacts of climate fiction on readers’ beliefs and attitudes about climate change. We found that reading climate fiction had small but significant positive effects on several important beliefs and attitudes about global warming – observed immediately after participants read the stories. However, these effects diminished to statistical nonsignificance after a one-month interval. In this paper, we review the relevant literature, present the design and results of this experiment, and discuss implications for future research and practice.

Americans increasingly accept that global warming is happening and a serious threat. Using secondary data from national probability surveys of the US adult population and preregistered hypotheses, we explore how and why Americans self-report changing their minds about global warming. Common reasons included learning more about the issue, hearing or seeing the effects of global warming, and personally experiencing its effects. We tested these reasons, as well as additional factors known to influence global warming opinion, including perceptions of social norms, media attention, and exposure to extreme weather, to assess their relative strength in predicting self-reported opinion change. As expected, perceived experience with global warming-particularly vicarious experience or seeing/hearing others experience its effects-emerged as a top correlate, even while statistically controlling for perceptions of social norms and attention to partisan-leaning media like Fox News. Perceived personal experience was a stronger correlate of self-reported opinion change among Republicans, whereas learning more about global warming was a stronger correlate among Democrats. Also as expected, perceiving social norms supportive of climate action was associated with positive self-reported opinion change, particularly among Republicans. Further, attention to the Fox News Channel was associated with negative self-reported opinion change but only among Republicans. Although this research is exploratory and uses self-reported data, it suggests that personalizing and localizing the threat of climate change, and enhancing the norm that most people support action, may be important factors to investigate in future longitudinal research on public opinion change and communication strategies.

Adoption of plant-based diets is one of the most impactful ways individuals can reduce carbon emissions, helping to mitigate climate change. People attach different degrees of importance to the attributes of their food, such as taste, environmental impact, and health considerations. Identifying key motivators and barriers to adopting plant-based diets, and how these differ among different groups, can inform campaigns to increase plant-based diets. Here, we identify three consumer groups using a nationally representative survey in the United States: Motivated, Health-conscious, and Uninterested. The groups significantly differ in their willingness to incorporate plant-based foods in their diet. Members of the Motivated group are strongly motivated by health, environmental, and ethical considerations, members of the Health-conscious are primarily motivated by health, and members of the Uninterested are not motivated to eat plant-based foods. We provide a four-question survey that can be used to identify these groups and empirically evaluate communication campaigns.

Despite Greta Thunberg's popularity, research has yet to investigate her impact on the public's willingness to take collective action on climate change. Using cross-sectional data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (N = 1,303), we investigate the "Greta Thunberg Effect," or whether exposure to Greta Thunberg predicts collective efficacy and intentions to engage in collective action. We find that those who are more familiar with Greta Thunberg have higher intentions of taking collective actions to reduce global warming and that stronger collective efficacy beliefs mediate this relationship. This association between familiarity with Greta Thunberg, collective efficacy beliefs, and collective action intentions is present even after accounting for respondents' overall support for climate activism. Moderated mediation models testing age and political ideology as moderators of the "Greta Thunberg Effect" indicate that although the indirect effect of familiarity with Greta Thunberg via collective efficacy is present across all age-groups, and across the political spectrum, it may be stronger among those who identify as more liberal (than conservative). Our findings suggest that young public figures like Greta Thunberg may motivate collective action across the U.S. public, but their effect may be stronger among those with a shared political ideology. Implications for future research and for broadening climate activists' appeals across the political spectrum are discussed.

Reducing global warming will require enacting strong climate policies, which is unlikely to happen without public support. While prior research has identified varied predictors of climate change policy support, it is unclear which predictors are strongest for the American electorate as a whole, and which predictors are strongest for Democrats and Republicans. In a nationally representative sample of registered voters (n = 2063), we use relative weight analysis to identify the strongest predictors of public climate policy support. We find that, among registered voters in the USA, the five most important predictors of climate policy support are: worry about global warming; risk perceptions; certainty that global warming is happening; belief that global warming is human-caused; and general affect toward global warming. Collectively, these five variables account for 51% of the variance in policy support. Results split by political party indicate that pro-climate injunctive norms and global warming risk perceptions are the variables that differ most between Republicans and Democrats, accounting for significantly more variance in policy support among Republicans. These findings can inform policymakers and advocates seeking to build public support for climate action.

National polls reveal stark and growing political divisions on the issue of climate change within the United States. However, few studies have explored whether these trends generalize to communities of color, who experience disproportionate environmental risks. Synthesizing over a decade of nationally representative survey data (2008-2019; N = 23,707), we conducted a conceptual replication and extension of previous research on the "racial/ethnic gap" in U.S. climate change opinion. Consistent with prior work, we find that African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos show less political polarization-including both weaker ideological and partisan divides-across a diverse range of belief, risk perception, and policy-support measures. Further, we find that this differential polarization has remained largely stable over time and is robust to effects of other sociodemographic variables, such as education and income. Notably, across the political spectrum, people of color were more likely to report that global warming poses a danger to themselves. Racial/ethnic differences were generally more pronounced among the political Right than the political Left, are generally larger for beliefs and risk perceptions (vs. policy support) and are only partially accounted for by racial/ethnic differences in ideology or party sorting. These results offer comprehensive evidence that climate change is less polarized among people of color in the U.S. Increasing diversity in the environmental sector and conducting more research on socio-cultural differences in environmental responses (including other racial/ethnic groups and indigenous populations) is important to promoting equity in decision-making, addressing environmental disparities, and potentially bridging growing political divides in the U.S.

In this working paper, we used a large national survey of American adults (N = 3,933) to estimate the effect of perceived social norms among friends and family (i.e., how often friends and family perform preventive behaviors, and whether they think it is important for the respondent to do so) on people’s own COVID-19 preventive behaviors. We found that perceived norms within these close relationships are often strongly associated with the adoption of preventive behavior--in some cases more than doubling the odds that an individual will engage in a given behavior.

This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey – Climate Change in the American Mind – conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (climatecommunication.yale.edu) and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (climatechangecommunication.org). Interview dates: November 8 – 20, 2019. Interviews: 1,303 adults in the U.S. (18+). Average margin of error +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. The research was funded by the 11th Hour Project, the Energy Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. A special thank you goes to Parrish Bergquist, PhD and Matto Mildenberger, PhD for creating an automated version of this report.

Americans strongly support policies aimed at increasing the use of renewable energy. Prior research has found that, overall, support for renewable energy tends to be motivated primarily by people's perceptions that it creates economic benefits and reduces environmental harms. However, the extant research has not established how these motivations vary across political segments. Here we investigate (a) if and how Republicans and Democrats differ in their stated motivations for supporting a transition to renewable energy, and (b) what demographic and attitudinal variables best predict Republicans' and Democrats' support for renewable energy policies. Using a nationally representative sample of American registered voters, we found a consistent pattern across multiple methods of analysis: Republicans' (compared to Democrats') support for renewable energy is driven more by considerations of economic costs/benefits, whereas Democrats' (compared to Republicans') support is driven more by concern about global warming. These partisan differences hold significant implications for those who seek to effectively tailor policy and strategic communication to these political segments.

On April 3 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that all Americans wear face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The announcement came during the fielding of a large, nationally-representative survey (N = 3,933) of Americans' COVID-19-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, providing an opportunity to measure the impact of the CDC's recommendation on public reported mask wearing and buying behavior. The study found significant increases in reported mask wearing (+12 percentage points) and mask buying (+7 points). These findings indicate the speed with which government recommendations can affect the adoption of protective behaviors by the public. The results demonstrate the importance of national leadership and communication during a public health crisis.

Global warming will disproportionately affect people of color (e.g., Latinos). Previous research has found that Latinos in the USA are more engaged with global warming than are non-Latino Whites, in part, because they are more likely to perceive it as a serious risk. It was unclear, however, what factors most strongly explain Latinos' elevated perceptions of risk. This study uses two parallel, nationally representative surveys of Latino and non-Latino White Americans to investigate these different levels of risk perception. Mediation analyses indicate that Latinos' greater risk perceptions may be explained by (in order of magnitude) their stronger pro-climate injunctive social norms and egalitarian worldviews, stronger identification with the Democratic party, more frequent communication with family outside the USA, greater harm from environmental hazards, stronger descriptive norms, and a weaker individualist worldview. These findings help inform strategies for communicating with different subgroups of Americans that have different global warming risk perceptions.

Drawing on a nationally representative survey (N = 1,029; including 911 registered voters), this report describes how Democratic, Independent, and Republican registered voters view global warming, climate and energy policies, and personal and collective action. This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey – Climate Change in the American Mind – conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (climatecommunication.yale.edu) and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (climatechangecommunication.org), Interview dates: April 7 – 17, 2020. Average margin of error +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Drawing on a scientific national survey (N = 3,933; including 3,188 registered voters), this report describes Americans’ coronavirus knowledge, attitudes, vulnerabilities, protective behaviors, and communication needs in an effort to inform the public health community, policymakers, and the public.

30 ENVIRONMENT WWW.TANDFONLINE.COM/VENV VOLUME 62 NUMBER 2 Scientists have concluded that the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) produced by fossil fuel companies causes global warming. Global warming, in turn, causes more extreme weather, droughts, wildfires, and flooding from rising sea levels, among other impacts. The impacts to infrastructure, ecosystems, and individuals are growing increasingly costly to many cities and states in the United States, often requiring them to rebuild their communities after extreme events and to invest in costly protections against future damages. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry has acted to stop or slow efforts to transition the global economy away from the fossil fuels that drive these costly climate impacts. Internal corpoBlame Where Blame Is Due: