Making sense of carbon footprints: how carbon literacy and quantitative literacy affects information gathering and decision-making

Abstract

Popular media often reports on the carbon footprint of certain activities, items or people. We were curious to explore how people make sense of these news pieces, and specifically, whether and how carbon literacy (CL) and quantitative literacy (QL) influences their reasoning. We interviewed and surveyed students of various backgrounds using simulated news pieces of three carbon footprints: that of Facebook, that of the US dairy industry, and that of the US chocolate industry. We found that being highly carbon or quantitatively literate influenced participants’ reaction – but only while they were gathering information about the prompts. The effect of literacies disappeared when they were asked to decide whether the carbon footprint was worrisome or which they would tackle first as a policy-maker. We describe and categorize the strategies students used to make sense of carbon footprints, and link the frequency of using particular strategies to their carbon and quantitative literacy. Implications for future research and environmental education are discussed.

Keywords:

• Carbon footprint
• reasoning
• decision-making
• carbon literacy
• quantitative literacy

Acknowledgments

We wish to extend our sincere thanks to Dr. Balazs Strenner for his help scoring our data, and to Cole Cook and Dr. Chaohua Ou for their kind input with our statistics. We owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Noah Weeth Feinstein for his comments on our manuscript, and three anonymous reviewers for their keen insights and suggestions. We further wish to thank all our study participants, without whom this work would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In our work, we use the word carbon in reference to the carbon-dioxide equivalent of greenhouse gases.

2 Translation from Hungarian by authors.