In the always-on world we are living in, we're inundated with information about climate change, but it is harder to tell how people actually respond to climate change information. A recently published findings report looks into how people are responding to this information.
Project Information Literacy (PIL), a nonprofit organization, conducted a survey focused specifically on how people “encounter, engage with, and respond to climate change news and information.” The online survey was completed by 4,503 members of the U.S. population between the ages of 16 to 85 in the fall of 2023. Following that a slightly modified version of the same online survey was completed by 1,593 college-age students (ages 18-34) at nine U.S. colleges in early 2024. The University of Minnesota Duluth was one of the nine participating colleges and had the largest number of respondents in the sample.
To quote the executive summary, this study “represents the largest and most comprehensive research effort to date on the technological and social information infrastructures that shape understanding of climate change in the United States. This work examines how divergent information worlds influence Americans’ understanding of the climate crisis while exploring how these complex, personalized webs of information shape their responses to the challenge of living on a warming planet.”
How did some of UMD’s students respond they felt based on recent discussions of climate change?
“ There’s no snow in Duluth. It’s February. My professor made a joke about it. I don’t think it’s a joke.”
“It makes me feel distressed because I am consistently learning about situations where climate change is already affecting people, especially those in less privileged situations. It makes me worry for people in more tropical and island climates such as Cuba where more frequent severe weather is destroying people’s homes.
“Burnout, worry.”
Data, especially surveys of this size, can help us develop an understanding of how information is perceived. This report groups respondents into three groups based on their responses to survey questions: the engaged, the detached, and the resistant. The information in the report can help members of our campus community learn more about “how people of all ages encounter, engage with, and respond to climate change news and information” and learn about how UMD students’ attitudes and beliefs about climate change are shaped by their experiences and the information they consume. Learning about these three groups can help us all understand how we collectively view the climate crisis and think about how to communicate with others whose beliefs and information practices are different from our own.
As one of the nine campuses that participated in the study, UMD received a packet with findings specific to UMD’s student community. This includes a narrative report and the raw data from this population. The report and data are available for interested researchers to download and use via the University Digital Conservancy, the University of Minnesota’s digital repository. If you have questions about this report, please contact Kate Conerton (Science and Engineering Librarian) and Kim Pittman (Research & Learning Team Manager).