Introduction
Whether it’s an unseasonably warm day, a comment on social media, or an alarming news segment about rising sea levels, we are constantly reminded that the climate is changing. From deadly storms to subtle shifts in the migratory patterns of birds, such experiences alter our relationship to a world once ordered around the predictable change of seasons. Climate change, with its unimaginable scale and complexity, is redefining communities, disrupting global relationships, and threatening the natural world.
After living through yet another hottest year on the planet, there is growing acceptance that a crisis once assumed to affect only the furthest reaches of the Earth now poses an immediate threat to us all. Consensus that climate change is real is at an all-time high in the U.S.1 And yet, the collective ability to comprehend and respond to threats posed by the climate crisis is jeopardized by ambivalence, skepticism, anxiety, and distrust.
Today, information flows toward us, online and in person, through multiple channels that have grown increasingly diverse, individualized, and unrelenting. With less agreement about what is true, what can be trusted, and where information has originated, it’s more challenging than ever for the public to reach agreement about how to respond to big, complex problems like climate change.
Previous research has tied divergent viewpoints about climate change to cultural, generational, and political differences.2 These distinctions are often measured by what people say they know and how it fits into their beliefs, social media use, and political affiliation. But while this research explains public opinion in terms of demographics and attitudes, it misses important clues about how people respond to the topic of climate change in conversations with others, in media they encounter, and in relation to themselves.
To fill this gap, our latest report from Project Information Literacy (PIL), an independent research institute, looks not at what people know about climate change, but how they know it. By leveraging our combined expertise in information science, information literacy, and data science, we examine the ways in which people living in America encounter, engage with, and respond to climate change news and information; how these interactions shape their perceptions of the worldwide climate emergency; and how these attitudes impact their willingness to take action, no matter how small it seems.
In a follow-up analysis, we look to the future to explore how college students encounter climate change news and information. They have encountered the threat of the climate crisis since childhood and will have to live with the crisis through the rest of their lives, depending on how we deal with climate change today.
Three sets of questions frame our inquiry:
- What do individuals in the U.S. understand, believe, and feel about climate change? How are their attitudes shaped by the information practices and technologies that mediate their encounters with climate change news and information?
- How do individuals engage with others in their own personal orbit on the subject of climate change? How willing are people to discuss climate change and listen to those who may hold different views? How much do such interpersonal interactions influence what they know and think about climate change?
- What information practices contribute to being informed about and engaged with the climate crisis and motivated to take action? Which practices contribute to inaction, distrust, ambivalence, hopelessness, and indifference?
To respond to these questions, we administered two large-scale online surveys: One was sent to a sample of 4,503 members of the general public, ages 16 to 85 years old; and the other to a sample of 1,593 college students enrolled in nine higher education institutions across the U.S.3 Results from each of the survey questions are available in our data dashboard.
Drawing from our analysis of the survey results, we identify three opportunities that better position climate change stakeholders — journalists, educators, librarians, activists, scientists, and policy analysts — wanting to encourage greater climate change engagement among a divided populace. Each of these opportunities is accompanied by a set of questions to open up discussion and pathways for action.
This report is divided into four parts:
Part 1: The Flattening Effect discusses how our acceptance and understanding of climate change is influenced by a variety of factors, including shared personal experiences with extreme weather and climate events across the country. These events have brought communities together, blurred their differences, and established a basis for collective climate action.
Part Two: Mapping the Terrain introduces the idea of information worlds, the collective channels of news and information people encounter, curate, and engage with to make sense of the world around them.4 We use information worlds as a framework to map the terrain of people’s opinions about climate change and the extent of their engagement with the issue.
Part Three: Views from Four Mile Markers identifies perspectives in the climate terrain belief systems, community alliances, and affinities and differences among our sample.
Part Four: The Road Ahead explores how the young understand and respond to climate change and their willingness to take action. We conclude our report by identifying three opportunities for building broader consensus in climate change engagement and action across the country, based on the results of our collective survey results.
Why this research matters now
There is growing attention to what climate activist Hannah Ritchie calls “urgent optimism.”5 That is, taking shared action to shape positive outcomes for a planet that is under a constant onslaught of ongoing climate disasters. The effect of these weather disasters on Americans has raised awareness that solutions are needed. At the same time, it has become the top priority as a serious challenge facing all of us, regardless of where we live or who we vote for in November.
In a heated presidential election season, when voters are split into hostile camps whose views reflect their political affiliation, shared action on climate change is often viewed at best as unrealistic and at worst as impossible. Political activists use the cost of climate change solutions to energize support from their constituents. These loud voices can take center stage in climate change debates, framing it as a partisan political issue in terms that often inflame fear and anger. The mentality that “you are either with us, or against us” is a theme of our political discourse that feeds the news of the moment.
The media prefer to highlight these debates rather than report on the choices we can make to mitigate the climate crisis. Moreover, social media platforms, through which a large portion of people in America share their concerns about the state of the planet, help promote messages fueled by the politics of anger, fear, and distrust of “the other side.” Algorithms designed to segment us into advertising markets distance us from one another as developments in artificial intelligence (AI) enable deceptive, targeted climate change messaging on a massive scale. As one respondent to our survey said, “I hear about climate change from all of these sources, but it’s actually disturbing in some ways because it’s not all accurate.”
No wonder so many people are turned off by the political discord that permeates public debate. By countering a common narrative of inevitable conflict, our findings can strengthen efforts to bridge our divides over this crisis and encourage action. Taken together, our report is meant to inform the development of new strategies for taking collective action to sustain the future of the planet at a time when it is urgently needed.