Communicating Climate Change: A Guide for Educators

3

CLIMATE CHANGE EDUCATION OUTCOMES

We often talk about our environmental education program’s success, but we may fail to specify the outcome that defines that success. Are we successful at instilling climate literacy? At fostering self-efficacy and individual pro-environmental behaviors, or at sparking deliberation, civic engagement, and collective action? Or maybe our intended outcome relates to positive youth development, inspiring hope, or some type of resilience?

Defining program outcomes is the first step in a program development cycle and works in concert with educators’ audience assessments. Climate change education outcomes are any desired changes that result from climate change education programs and that are intended to enhance natural and human systems by reducing greenhouse gasses and, where needed, helping communities adapt to climate change in an environmentally sound manner.¹ Specifying outcomes enables educators to strategically plan and evaluate program activities. It is important to note that making a program’s desired outcomes transparent also enables educators to reflect on how likely their activities are to reach their goals, and to adjust if necessary. Below, we describe three categories of climate change education outcomes drawn from environmental education and climate change communication research, as well as from our own experience and conversations with climate change educators: individual outcomes like climate literacy, attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavior change; community outcomes like collective efficacy, social capital, and collective action; and direct environmental outcomes. We conclude with a short discussion of resilience, a term that can refer to individuals, communities, ecosystems, and integrated social-ecological systems.

Climate Change and Environmental Education Outcomes Focused on Individuals

Climate literacy (knowledge and skills), positive attitudes and emotions, and self-efficacy all contribute to changes in individual environmental behaviors.

Climate Literacy

Climate literacy blends knowledge and skills. Climate knowledge includes knowledge about climate systems and processes, and about how humans affect climate, how climate change affects humans, and what actions humans can take to mitigate and adapt to climate change. While knowledge is one factor in people’s decision to act pro-environmentally (or toward climate change solutions), knowledge on its own is not sufficient for motivating behavior change.² Knowledge differs from climate awareness, which is a broad concept referring to knowing that something exists.³ In environmental education, awareness refers to an individual’s perception of, influence on, and concern for the environment.⁴ Climate-related skills are abilities that enable someone to perform a task and lead to a desired action or goal over time.⁵ Climate literacy skills include communicating about climate change, assessing climate-related information,⁶ and participating in constructive dialogue.

According to Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science, a climate literate person

• understands the essential principles of the earth’s climate system,
• knows how to assess scientifically credible information about climate
• communicates about climate and climate change in a meaningful way, and
• is able to make informed and responsible decisions with regard to actions that may affect climate.⁷

The National Academy of Sciences also includes behavior change under the umbrella of climate literacy.⁸

Environmental literacy is broader than climate literacy. Environmental literacy is defined as the ability to make informed decisions concerning the environment; being willing to act on these decisions to improve the well-being of other individuals, societies, and the global environment; and participating in civic life.⁹

Attitudes and Emotions

Attitudes and emotions are included in definitions of environmental literacy but are generally left out of definitions of climate literacy. However, understanding attitudes and emotions is critical to designing climate education programs.

Attitudes are cognitive representations of how people evaluate an action, event, idea, or thing.¹⁰ The building blocks for attitudes include values, beliefs, and emotions.¹¹ Many environmental education programs operate with the goal of promoting positive attitudes toward the environment, although research shows that attitudes are very hard to change.¹² A large body of climate change communication research focuses on understanding public attitudes toward climate change and on experimenting with the ways in which communication affects attitudes. This research can help environmental educators target their message while avoiding trying to directly change attitudes.

Attitude Components

Educators may seek to understand attitudes broadly or to target the specific components of attitudes.

• Values, the guiding principles by which people live and preferences about how society should function,¹³ form the basis of attitudes.
• Beliefs represent a person’s subjective knowledge about the world; beliefs are distinguished from knowledge, which is based on facts.¹⁴ For example, in the climate change context, one person might hold the belief that the planet is experiencing a pronounced warming period because of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, whereas another may believe that the warming trend simply reflects natural variability in global temperatures. A third person may believe that climate change is a hoax and discount the temperature evidence entirely. These different beliefs about the same knowledge (warmer temperatures) hold implications for attitudes about climate change and behavioral intentions.
• Emotions are related to beliefs and attitudes. For example, if a person believes that climate change poses a serious threat to human society, including a direct personal threat, that person may experience the emotion of fear and demonstrate fearful attitudes. While fearful attitudes can be pro-environmental attitudes and foster pro-environmental behaviors, fearing climate change might also result in a terror management response that actually decreases the likelihood someone will engage in pro-environmental behavior (see chapter 6).

Emotions: Hope and Fear

Emotions not only play a role in defining attitudes; they also can be education outcomes. Emotions are psychological and physiological responses to stimuli, and they guide information processing and behavior.¹⁵

Hope is an emotion that consists of goals (what we want to happen), pathway thinking (our ability to figure out how to meet those goals), and agency thinking (a motivation to use those pathways).¹⁶ Hope has been associated with willingness to engage in pro-environmental behavior.¹⁷

Fear is an uncomfortable emotional response to a perceived threat.¹⁸ Although the media frequently employ fear appeals to communicate about climate change, a more effective strategy may be to inspire hope in audiences with the goal of supporting climate change action.

Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy refers to confidence in your ability to achieve goals. It is an “empowerment variable” and an important factor in fostering responsible environmental behavior.¹⁹ A strong sense of self-efficacy results in people expending more effort in the face of obstacles like climate change.²⁰

Environmental Behaviors

Environmental behaviors are changes made by an individual, such as installing solar panels on one’s home, turning down the heat, reducing consumption, or purchasing a fuel-efficient vehicle.

Climate Change and Environmental Education Outcomes Focused on Communities

Positive youth development, in which youth develop leadership, communication, and other assets, is included in this section on community-level outcomes. This is because youth assets are often an outcome of environmental education programs that involve community gardening or some other form of collective action; youth with leadership skills and other assets are also more likely to engage in collective action.

Youth Assets

Positive youth development is an asset-based approach to promoting young people’s well-being physically (e.g., through good health habits), intellectually (e.g., through critical thinking), psychologically (e.g., through building confidence), and socially (e.g., through trusting others).²¹ In addition to helping youth live productive lives, such assets help enable youth to engage in positive environmental behaviors and collective actions. Environmental education—in particular programs where youth build citizenship skills through civic engagement—can be a way to achieve positive youth development.²²

Social Capital

Social capital has multiple definitions focusing on the personal and collective or social benefits of connections with others. It generally refers to the relationships, trust, and shared norms that individuals can draw on to work through collective problems like allocating green space or taking action to mitigate climate change.²³

• Trust is a key component of social capital and a prerequisite for collective action and collaboration. Researchers have defined trust in multiple ways, but these definitions all converge around the idea that trust is a psychological state that accepts some form of vulnerability and concerns the person who trusts, the person who is deemed trustworthy, and an action.²⁴ Environmental education programs in which youth work together to achieve a challenging goal can build trust among participants.²⁵ In climate change communication, one important aspect of gaining trust is the use of a trusted messenger (see chapter 9).²⁶
• Positive dialogue can build the connections that are part of social capital.²⁷ Climate change education programs that promote discussions requiring participants to reflect on the trade-offs of their own views while also acknowledging the benefits of fellow participants’ views may be particularly effective at fostering positive dialogue.²⁸

Collective Efficacy

Collective efficacy is a belief that a group can achieve its goals.²⁹ Audiences can easily feel “disempowered by the scale of environmental problems” and can benefit from “opportunities to work for social and environmental change with others to acquire a collective sense of competence.”³⁰ Like trust, collective efficacy is a stepping-stone to collective action.³¹

Collective Action

Collective action is action taken by a group in pursuit of perceived shared interests.³² Examples of collective actions to address climate change include volunteer groups restoring dune habitat to enhance shoreline stability, or a neighborhood forming a renewable energy collective or working with a city or town to improve infrastructure for bike commuters. Similar to environmental action, climate change action integrates science knowledge and civic engagement, and can also include voting and other policy-related activities.³³

Climate Change and Environmental Education Outcomes Focused on the Environment

Positive environmental outcomes are direct environmental improvements such as restoring ecosystem services or improving water and air quality. In climate change education, mitigation and ecosystem-based adaptation are environmental outcomes.

Climate Change Mitigation

Climate change mitigation is defined as slowing down climate change by reducing and stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions or enhancing greenhouse gas sinks.³⁴ Climate mitigation actions include planting trees and switching to renewable energy to reduce use of coal, oil, and gas.

Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change adaptation is about helping people and environments prepare for and adjust to climate change. Adaptation efforts attempt to reduce society’s vulnerability to climate change impacts, like sea level rise, extreme storm events, and water and food shortages, and include activities like installing permeable pavement to reduce flooding or restoring dunes to slow shoreline erosion.³⁵ Note that not all adaptation practices are consistent with environmental education principles. New coastal developments may include houses raised on stilts, reducing the likelihood of the homes flooding but failing to address the underlying environmental issues. Environmental education can play a role in helping adaptation efforts incorporate mitigation outcomes.³⁶ Ecosystem-based adaptation activities, like restoring and maintaining mangroves, mitigate climate change by ensuring the mangroves remain a carbon sink while helping communities adapt to climate change by reducing flood impacts related to sea level rise.

Resilience

Resilience is a term we hear frequently in relation to climate change (table 3.1). In general, resilience refers to the ability of individuals, communities, ecosystems, and social-ecological systems to respond to change, including hardship and disasters. Climate change educators working in areas impacted by major storms, drought, wildfire, or other natural disasters exacerbated by climate change may be particularly interested in fostering community and social-ecological resilience.³⁷

TABLE 3.1 Resilience definitions

Bottom Line for Educators

Climate change education programs target a variety of environmental education outcomes that overlap with climate change communication goals. Defining outcomes early on in the program development process will assist educators in choosing appropriate activities to meet their goals and their audiences’ needs.