How can journalists and other communicators create effective messaging that will both inform Americans about the negative impacts of climate change on their health, and inspire them to act?

A new study by SC&I Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Lauren Feldman and her coauthors, which to their knowledge is the first to evaluate public responses to different categories of solutions to address the health effects of climate change, analyzed a number of messages and combinations of messages to test which were most likely to motivate Americans to contact their Congressional representatives to ask them to take action to mitigate climate change.

“One key takeaway from our results is that messages are most effective when they focus on both the health impacts of climate change and potential solutions, rather than one or the other,” Feldman said.

Their findings suggest Americans are most motivated to act by messages that combine three types of information: descriptions of how impacts from climate change endanger human health; hopeful information about available solutions; and how others are taking action.

“One key takeaway from our results is that messages are most effective when they focus on both the health impacts of climate change and potential solutions, rather than one or the other,” Feldman said.

Feldman’s paper, “Advocacy messages about climate and health are more effective when they include information about risks, solutions, and a normative appeal: Evidence from a conjoint experiment,” coauthored with John Kotcher, Kate T. Luong, and Edward Maibach at George Mason University and James Wyatt at Climate Nexus, was published in The Journal of Climate Change and Health. 

Their results, Feldman said, “offer valuable guidance for how to communicate the health implications of climate change in a way that encourages action, and might be of particular interest to health professionals who want to promote sustainability and climate actions to their patients, clients, colleagues, students, policymakers, and the general public.”

Feldman and her coauthors studied 360 message combinations that varied 1) the type of health impact of climate change, 2) the type of solution to address the health effects of climate change, and 3) the type of call-to-action appeal.

For example, Feldman said, an effective message created to explain the impact of air pollution, caused by the use of fossil fuels, on human health would “first describe the negative impacts of climate change on air quality, then explain how transitioning to clean energy will benefit people's health, and end by explaining that most Americans support this solution, and many are taking action to advocate for it.”

While noting that many of the impacts of climate change on human health are becoming more and more noticeable and harder to deny, given, as the paper describes, “rising global temperatures that directly heighten the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts, directly damaging public health across broad geographical locations . . . and shifting climate patterns that lead to an increase in the prevalence of vector-borne diseases, a reduction in crop yields and nutritional values, contamination of food and water, and rising socio-political conflicts,” many Americans still do not believe climate change caused by human behavior is happening or that it will ultimately impact them, their families, or communities.

For the study, Feldman and her coauthors surveyed a large, demographically diverse group of U.S. adults, approximating a nationally representative sample.

Their results, Feldman said, “offer valuable guidance for how to communicate the health implications of climate change in a way that encourages action, and might be of particular interest to health professionals who want to promote sustainability and climate actions to their patients, clients, colleagues, students, policymakers, and the general public.”

Of all the potential climate change-induced health problems, solutions, and calls-to-action they tested in the survey, they found “the most compelling type of health impact was poor air quality, followed by food-borne illness, and extreme weather. The least compelling impact was extreme heat.

“The most compelling type of solution focused on the health benefits of transitioning to clean energy, followed by more healthy cities/communities, and more healthy forms of consumption. The least effective solution was focused on healthy food."

Further, their research found that the most effective call-to-action leveraged positive descriptive norms to encourage people to contact their member of Congress, followed by negative descriptive norms and surplus efficacy. The least compelling call-to-action was the deficit efficacy statement.

"Positive descriptive norms emphasize that many people are doing a positive behavior (in this case, taking action in support of climate mitigation)," Feldman said. "Negative descriptive norms emphasize that many people are not doing a positive behavior. Surplus efficacy emphasizes that policymakers are already responding to people's actions. Deficit efficacy suggests that policymakers will be responsive once they learn what the public wants. Table 3 in the paper shows how we operationalized these appeal types in our study." 

Feldman and her co-authors also noted in the paper that while their findings showed that the “high degree of consistency in how participants ranked the various types of information across racial and partisan groups is notable given that climate change is a politically polarized issue . . . and although Republicans and Democrats ranked the messages similarly, it is still reasonable to expect that Democrats would be more responsive to the same message relative to Republicans given their higher willingness to engage in climate advocacy.”

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