After the forum I realized there is more I can do: communicating climate change to youth using public deliberation

Abstract

Communicating the need to address climate change has been hampered by a lack of immediacy and scientific literacy. Engaging youth will be critical for addressing these deficiencies, but limited research exists about young people’s knowledge and hope about climate change. To address this need, we assessed the efficacy of public deliberation among youth using five environmental issue forums (EIFs) to positively affect general awareness knowledge of climate change and hope for an improved future. Our results showed general awareness knowledge prior to participation in an EIF was significantly different among five groups but increased to relatively the same level for all groups afterwards. Alternatively, hope showed no difference among groups before participation in an EIF but increased in four of five groups afterwards. These results suggest public deliberation in the form of EIFs can potentially improve climate change communication among young people.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for support from the North American Association for Environmental Education and the Kettering Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project received support from Missouri EPSCoR which was partially funded by National Science Foundation Missouri Transect project under Award #IIA-1355406 and #IIA-1430427, the School of Natural Resources at the University of Missouri, and Prairie Fork Charitable Endowment Trust.