Project Summary Statement

The aim of this project was to expand science-based local news reporting on climate change, nationwide, and thereby help the American people better understand the local relevance and urgency of global climate change, and local response options. Specifically, we sought to extend the reach of Climate Matters--a highly-successful localized climate reporting resource program developed for TV weathercasters--to enable a broader community of local journalists to report on local climate change impacts and local adaptation and mitigation responses. Earth's changing climate is causing serious impacts in every region of the U.S.--on weather, health, agriculture, water, other natural resources, transportation, and infrastructure--and these impacts are projected to become more severe over the coming decades. To mitigate risk and increase resilience, members of the public need the best possible understanding of changing climatic conditions and response options.

Prior to proposing the project, we had built Climate Matters into a reporting resource program that was supporting 350 weathercasters at 218 stations, with at least one participating weathercaster in 56% of U.S. media markets. For this project, we established five inter-related goals: (1) Use formative research and process evaluation to determine how best to evolve Climate Matters reporting resources to meet the needs of journalists beyond the weather beat; (2) Recruit 200 additional weathercasters and 200 other journalists into the Climate Matters network; (3) Provide climate reporting training and professional development experiences to 700 members of the network; (4) Produce and distribute Climate Matters reporting packages to all members of the network on a near-weekly basis; and (5) Evaluate the impacts of the climate reporting on public understanding of climate change.

We fully achieved all five goals established for the project: (1) Our in-depth interviews and surveys conducted with journalists enabled us to modify the Climate Matters resource materials to meet the needs of a broader community of our journalists; (2) We recruited 741 additional weathercasters and 1,682 other journalists into the Climate Matters network, exceeding our recruitment goals for weathercasters and other journalists by 370% and 841%, respectively; (3) We trained a total of 3,338 weathercasters and other journalists, exceeding our training goal by 476%; (4) We delivered Climate Matters reporting materials to all participants in the Climate Matters network on a near-weekly basis throughout the period of the project; and (5) During the project, on-air reporting of Climate Matters stories nationwide increased from 879 annually in 2017 to 5,672 annually in 2021--a 645% increase in stories reported.

We conducted two impact evaluation studies, both of which demonstrated that audience members who are exposed to Climate Matters reporting gained improved understanding of climate change as a locally relevant problem. The first study--an in vitro study in which local news views in Chicago and Miami were asked to watch three Climate Matters segments produced by weathercasters in Chicago and Miami--demonstrated significant improvements of public understanding of climate change as a locally-relevant issue (Feygina, et al., 2020). The paper concluded: "(O)ur findings demonstrate that watching even a brief amount of localized climate reporting (less than 6 min) delivered by TV weathercasters helps viewers develop a more accurate understanding of global climate change as a locally and personally relevant problem, and offer strong support for this promising approach to promoting enhanced public understanding of climate change through public media." The second study--an in vivo study conducted with nationally representative polling data collected over the decade since the launch of the Climate Matters pilot-test in one media market?demonstrated significant impacts of Climate Matters reporting on improved public understanding of climate change as a locally relevant issue, nationwide (Myers, et al, 2020). The paper concluded: "(T)here is a significant positive association between the amount of Climate Matters reporting and some key indicators of science-based understanding (including that climate change is occurring, primarily human caused, and causes harm)."

To the best of our knowledge, Climate Matters is the only Advancing Informal Science Learning (AISL) initiative to have ever demonstrated a nationwide impact on public understanding of climate change in the United States. We recently published a 10-year retrospective on Climate Matters--including implications for other initiatives aiming to improve public understanding of climate change--as an open-access paper in Nature Climate Change (Maibach et al, 2022).

Citations:

Feygina, I., et al. (2020) Localized climate reporting by TV weathercasters enhances public understanding of climate change as a local problem: Evidence for a randomized controlled experiment. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0079.1

Maibach, E., et al. (2022) Improving public understanding of climate change by supporting weathercasters. Nature Climate Change. 10.1038/s41558-022-01433-2

Myers, T., et al. (2020) Impact of the Climate Matters Program on Public Understanding of Climate Change.  Weather, Climate and Society. https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-20-0026.1

Last Modified: 10/26/2022
Modified by: Edward Maibach