Framing climate change communication to prompt individual and collective action among adolescents from agricultural communities

Abstract

Climate communication research suggests strategic message framing may help build public consensus on climate change causes, risks and solutions. However, few have investigated how framing applies to adolescents. Similarly, little research has focused on agricultural audiences, who are among the most vulnerable to and least accepting of climate change. Among 950 high school agriculture students in North Carolina, we found agriculture and environment framing of climate change, but not community and health frames, elicited feelings of worry, and these together with community frames elicited hope. Further, students feeling more worry were more supportive of individual and collective action. Those accepting climate change and females had more emotive responses and higher support for all action measures, and acceptance of human causes predicted more worry and support for collective action. We find these results encouraging as agriculture teachers likely employ agriculture and environment frames when following best teaching practices.

Keywords:

• Climate communication
• framing
• climate literacy
• agriculture
• climate change
• climate education

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all participating teachers and students as well as the USDA NIFA postdoctoral fellowship program for funding support (Grant # 11832784)