Biography

Dr. Nathan Vadeboncoeur is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellow at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. His research integrates the study of risk perception with decision-analysis to explore ways to build community resilience to environmental hazards.

Article Title

Building Public Support for Climate Change Initiatives: Addressing the Communications Failure

Abstract

Widespread media coverage of climate change has brought it to the forefront of global consciousness as one of the major issues of the 21st century yet public knowledge of this phenomenon remains weak (Etkin and Ho, 2007). Drawing on data from a survey conducted in British Columbia, Canada, the findings presented here suggest that current efforts to increase public climate change literacy through the media have been ineffective. Recent research has demonstrated that world-views serve as a filter for information and influence environmental risk perception more strongly than any other individual characteristic. This presents a barrier to public education efforts intended to increase support for climate change initiatives by shifting public conceptualizations of risk to be more in line with those of the scientific community (e.g. Kahan, 2010; Lesierowitz, 2006).

This study demonstrates that the world-views of individuals are a stronger predictor of both attitudes toward, and knowledge of, climate change than demographic and personal characteristics. This finding holds when controlling for the exposure to, and variety of, sources of environmental information to which individuals are exposed. The influence of world-view on risk perception described here is stronger for highly politicized climate change risks than a variety of other less politicized environmental risks, supporting research claiming that climate change has become associated with dominant social narratives that bias the way individuals interpret information. These studies suggest that climate change has become engrained into broader social narratives and is no longer perceived as a strictly scientific issue. Rather, efforts to address climate change are frequently seen as attempts by particular groups to advance their values. Increasing public support for climate change initiatives may require a new approach that takes into account the way climate change is socially constructed by highlighting the way adaptation programmes are commensurate with the values encapsulated by a variety of world-views.