Public understanding of climate change terminology

Wändi Bruine de Bruin (), Lila Rabinovich, Kate Weber, Marianna Babboni, Monica Dean and Lance Ignon
Additional contact information
Wändi Bruine de Bruin: University of Southern California
Lila Rabinovich: United Nations Foundation
Kate Weber: United Nations Foundation
Marianna Babboni: United Nations Foundation
Monica Dean: United Nations Foundation
Lance Ignon: United Nations Foundation

Climatic Change, 2021, vol. 167, issue 3, No 11, 21 pages

Abstract: Abstract The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other institutions communicate about climate change to diverse audiences without a background in climate science, including the general public. The effectiveness of these communications depends in part on how well the presented terminology is understood. In qualitative interviews, we examined how US residents interpreted key terms drawn from IPCC reports, including tipping point, unprecedented transition, carbon neutral, carbon dioxide removal, adaptation, mitigation, sustainable development, and abrupt change. We recruited twenty participants with diverse views on climate change from a nationally representative sample. We identified common themes and misunderstandings. Overall, 88% of the themes arose by the tenth interview, and no new themes arose after the seventeenth interview. Mitigation, carbon neutral, and unprecedented transition were perceived as the most difficult to understand. Adaptation and abrupt change were perceived as the easiest to understand. However, even if a term appeared to be understood, participants were not always clear about how it applied to climate change. Participants tended to draw on their mental models of non-climate contexts where terms had different meanings. Reading the terms in the context of sentences taken from communication materials was not always helpful due to the use of complex language. Based on participants’ interpretations and the science communication literature, we provide suggestions for communicating about each term. Generally, recommendations are to simplify wording, make links to climate change explicit, and describe underlying processes. Our findings are relevant to climate change communications by the IPCC and other institutions.

Keywords: Science communication; Climate change; Expert terminology; Public understanding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-021-03183-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:167:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-021-03183-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-021-03183-0

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().