Project Team and Abstract
Project Leadership Team: Carl Renshaw, Professor, Dartmouth Earth Sciences; Kimberly Rose Clark, Lecturer, Dartmouth Psychology & Brain Sciences; Erich Osterberg, Professor, Dartmouth Earth Sciences
Effective communication around climate change and around actions needed to avoid its worst impacts is important, but challenging. Research has shown that it is not simply a matter of providing accessible information to people — in fact, it is well documented that there is a limited link between knowledge and attitudes. Nor is there "one" effective way to communicate information about climate change. Instead, for climate change communicators to have a real impact, there is a need to develop and deploy a synergistic and systematic approach to understanding the impacts of different climate messaging strategies on diverse sets of stakeholders and communities.
The project team will use their award to create a first-of-its-kind research lab dedicated to identifying effective climate messaging strategies using both traditional measures of stated intentions and attitudes as well as novel implicit, nonconscious attitudinal measures garnered from applied affective and consumer neuroscience. The Dartmouth team will collaborate with partners from Tufts and Middle Tennessee State University, leveraging the diverse communities on those campuses, to identify tailored messaging strategies that inform sustainable climate action in specific populations.