Open research questions in Climate Change Communication and Perception
132 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 3,150 Climate Change Communication and Perception papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
Based on the research findings, it is evident that an emphasis should be placed on correcting misconceptions about climate change based on basic science. Building on the momentum of those who are aware, concerned, and able to spot the changes, these students can act as focal points for climate action. Efforts to motivate students to participate more in climate change-related services or activities should be encouraged, possibly integrating these activities into their academic grading. Given the diversity of local conditions across Egyptian regions, together with uneven awareness of national strategies and campaigns among the surveyed students, there is a clear need for a more structured and context-sensitive framework for climate change education in higher education institutions. This could be achieved through drawing an inspiration from other frameworks such as the European GreenComp, which defines sustainability competencies for learners in different settings and focuses on building sustainability competences through interconnected actions and engagement by embodying sustainability values, embracing complexity in sustainability, envisioning sustainable futures, and acting for sustainability (Bianchi et al., 2022) However, localization should be considered and content should be tailored at the community level, given that different communities have different priorities, which in turn result in different pathways of action that require certain knowledge and skills. For example, coastal communities affected by sea level rise need a different skill set and priorities compared to those in Upper Egypt, who prioritize agricultural stress, such as water scarcity. HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMUNICATIONS | (2026) 13:1117 | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-08215-7 13 ARTICLE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-08215-7 Additionally, it is important to educate and include all pathways, including legal ones, to take action against violations that double the effects of global warming, such as industrial emissions or mismanaged waste. The university can start by encouraging recycling within the university community by contracting waste collection companies and spread awareness about recyclable materials and facilities in their governorate. This approach acknowledges that not all governorates recycle the same materials or have the same facilities across Egypt. Moreover, universities should incorporate multimedia in their pedagogies since the study showed that students rely on social media to get knowledge and updates in comparison to traditional methods. Finally, there is a clear need for the Ministry of Higher Education to unify, increase, and structure knowledge of climate change, including developing thinking skills, encouraging climate action, and increasing motivation.
Enhancing climate change education in Egyptian higher education institutions: barriers, opportunities, and student awareness levels · 2026 · DOI1 Google must update its policy on climate denial content 2 Digital platforms must demonetize and de-amplify climate denial content 3 Climate advocates: use this report as a call to action to address New Denial Appendix 1: Methodology Appendix 2: Limitations Appendix 3: List of YouTube channels Appendix 4: Super-claims over…
Contemporary climate governance continues to struggle with this temporal logic; long-term commitments proliferate, including those associated with international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement, while immediate and proportionate measures remain insufficient relative to scientific warnings.
A THEATRICAL INACTION: CLIMATE CHANGE RISK, BUREAUCRATIC INERTIA, AND ETHICAL ABDICATION IN STEVE WATERS’S THE CONTINGENCY PLAN · 2026 · DOI, 1995), we examined, for the first time, how the interplay between personal and substantive content – the hallmark of greenfluencers’ communication (Breves & Liebers, 2022) – is processed by young women through processes of “hot” and “cold” cognition, which addresses a crucial gap in the literature.
Cold Facts on the Influencer Hotline: A Digital Field Experiment Investigating “Hot” and “Cold” Processing of Greenfluencer Content · 2026 · DOIOf course, this study has some limitations. First, despite our efforts to enhance the external validity in our field experiment as much as possible, participants were exposed to a fictitious influencer, which at best allowed only the early stages of parasocial relationship development. Future research should investi- gate these connections with real influencers and their audiences to be able to generalize these findings to followers’ mature relationships with influencers. Second, the influencer’s account had a limited number of followers, as the experiment took place in a real social media environment where participants were essentially the only audience. To mitigate this, participants were informed in the survey that the influencer has 37K followers in real life. 24 H. DEKONINCK ET AL. Likes and comments were also kept constant to control for social cues. These design choices may have shaped participants’ perceptions of interacting with a real influencer. Future research could explore these dynamics using fully active accounts or by collaborating with established influencers. Moreover, highly educated individuals and those with high environmental concern were overrepresented in our sample, which may explain some of the null findings. The overrepresentation of environmentally involved individuals in our sample may be a natural consequence of women’s higher involvement with environmental issues (e.g., Kennedy & Kmec, 2018) and may have led to ceiling effects with regard to the dependent variables not allowing much variance for the mediators to explain. Moreover, higher educated individuals may have been more likely to notice the influencer’s strategic use of self- disclosure, which may have resulted in some kind of reactance to the persua- sion attempt. Future studies may aim to recruit a more diverse sample with regard to environmental involvement; yet, these participants may also be less likely to be the target group of greenfluencers. Finally, our a-priori power analysis was aimed at regression models not taking the complexities of a path model like multiple dependent variables or mediators into account. Therefore, we were likely not able to detect small-to-medium effects in our model.
Cold Facts on the Influencer Hotline: A Digital Field Experiment Investigating “Hot” and “Cold” Processing of Greenfluencer Content · 2026 · DOIclimate-adaptation planning so that young people experience tangible influence; community disasterpreparedness initiatives around haze and tidal flooding can be structured as youth-led collectives with visible, attributable outcomes; and school and university environmental curricula can pair factual content with supervised collective-action projects that build efficacy experientially. Public communication that legitimises moral anger at institutional inaction, paired with credible channels for collective action, is likely to be more mobilising, and less psychologically costly, than messaging that amplifies fear without efficacy; efficacyladen hope is a comparably potent motivational resource.19,24 Because activism was measured as willingness, programmes should also attend to the intention-behaviour gap, providing low-friction pathways that convert willingness into sustained participation. Four limitations qualify the findings. First, the crosssectional design precludes causal inference; the proposed sequence from anxiety through anger to activism is theoretically motivated and survived a reverse-ordering check but requires longitudinal or experimental confirmation. Second, although Harman's test, the latent method-factor model, and the diversity of construct correlations mitigate the concern, singlesource self-report data cannot wholly exclude commonmethod variance.
From Eco-Anxiety to Climate Activism: The Moderating Role of Collective Efficacy Among Generation Z in Indonesia · 2026 · DOIAlthough many studies reported convergence between perceived and observed trends, these conclusions should be interpreted with caution because of persistent tem- poral mismatches, underreported recall frames, and limited attention to cognitive sources of bias such as memory distor- tion or recency effects.
A systematic review of studies comparing environmental change perceptions and instrument-derived meteorological data · 2026 · DOIBy contrast, relatively few studies have been conducted in regions with lower direct climate sensitivity, such as urban areas or more industrialized economies, where livelihoods are less immediately tied to weather variability.
A systematic review of studies comparing environmental change perceptions and instrument-derived meteorological data · 2026 · DOIExploratory factor analysis shows meaningful common movement but mixed evidence for a settled latent trait, and therefore PCA is used to construct a transparent composite rather than a validated scale.
This study is subject to limitations regarding its spatial scope and sample characteristics, which are centered on active followers of a visual-based social media account predominantly composed of younger cohorts (Generation Z and Millennials). The highly personalized conditioning of social media algorithms introduces a potential selective exposure bias that may not reflect the broader sociological characteristics of the Indonesian public at the grassroots level. Consequently, future research agendas are advised to expand the geographic scope and demographic diversity of respondents, particularly by including age groups that are more vulnerable to digital climate risks. Furthermore, integrating a mixed-methods research design—incorporating qualitative digital ethnography or textual content analysis of message captions—is recommended to explore other external factors beyond the current model, such as local collective efficacy or the actual severity of drought impacts in the respondents' respective regions, which possess the potential to bridge the chasm between public cognitive awareness and the tangible implementation of disaster adaptation actions. REFERENCES 1) CNBC Indonesia. (2026). Dry season arrives, BMKG issues latest warning on strong El Niño. Cnbcindonesia.Com. https://www.cnbcindonesia.com/news/20260406103026-4-724107/musim-kemarau-datang-bmkg-keluarkan-peringatanterbaru-el-nino-kuat 2) Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Mixed Methods Procedures. In Research Defign: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed M ethods Approaches.
Information Exposure and Followers' Daily Activity Readiness Facing El Niño: A Path Analysis of Perceived Risk Communication Narratives · 2026 · DOIThere are several limitations to consider when interpreting the results of our study. First, terms were presented without definitions, in line with other wording experiments that examined the effect of climate-related terms on public responses [14–16,31]. Especially among low-income populations, explaining what “climate justice” means could increase recognition of the concept [38] and policy support [43]. Second, we did not elicit what participants thought of when being presented with “climate justice” or other terms. Hence, we do not know if the presented terms actually differed in the associations they elicited, including thoughts about climate-related inequities, especially among low- income recipients. Third, our Los Angeles County sample overrepresented individuals with low income and a college education (Table 1). This facilitated the exploration of potential income-related differences and we did not adjust for the overrepresentations through sample weighting. Fourth, the more familiar terms have been used for a longer time, which may account for their higher effectiveness in eliciting concern [27,33,35]. Whether this applies to “climate justice” remains to be seen. A study from the United Kingdom suggests that “climate justice” may alienate individu- als on the political right [61], although that has also been true for “global warming” [29], a term that lost its divisive connotations over time [35]. Fifth, questions about policy support and consuming less red meat were presented after a statement that mentioned the randomly assigned term, leading to concerns that participants may not have noticed the randomly assigned term. This question design may have obscured the randomized term, reducing its potential impact. However, survey research has shown that respondents do consider such contexts when generating their answers to survey questions [62–63]. Sixth, while supporting climate policies and consuming less red meat are important ways to mitigate climate change, participants may have been more responsive to questions about willing- ness to support energy conservation, renewable energy, cap and trade programs, or other specific policies. Seventh, the number of participants receiving each term was too small to allow for comparisons of more than two income categories. Eighth, Los Angeles County leans mostly Democratic, which may undermine generalization to other counties in the United States. Yet, as noted, the wording effects we found in this Los Angeles County are similar to those reported for a nationally representative U.S. sample [31]. Finally, household income was measured without accounting for household size, which may affect how hard or easy it is to make ends meet on a specific household income [64].
Do low-income groups respond more positively to “climate justice” than to other terms from the public discourse about climate change and sustainability? Evidence from a survey-based wording experiment with a representative Los Angeles County sample · 2026 · DOIBased on our evaluations of these events, we make the following recommendations. Firstly, maintain a balance between entertaining stories and scientific insights, and correct misrepresentations. Given that S&C audiences expected scientific insights and entertainment rather than detailed research results, we recommend focusing on a general understanding of scientific concepts. Secondly, incorporate references to local environments 2. Unlike in research, however, these leading questions themselves could serve as part of the intervention during the S&C event. Priest [2019, p. 391] claims that science communicators should not just educate, but also engage in persuasion, since “climate change is an unprecedented emergency proceeding at an accelerating pace”. In that way, the questions themselves posed at the beginning and end of the event may serve as persuasive element by providing individual feedback on the participants’ progress in attitudinal change during the event and thereby serve as a motivating “take-away”.
The communication format, Science & Cinema: reflecting on representations of science in movies for joint meaning-making · 2026 · DOIRecognizing that “addressing climate change demands the involvement” of English Language Arts and Literacy (ELA-L) teachers (National Council of Teachers of English, Citation2019), research remains to be done on how ELA-L teachers use language and communication themselves around climate and socioecological crisis.
“Stories are our survival guides”: Ecojustice literacies in politically and ecologically vulnerable places · 2024 · DOIThe present study seeks to fill the current gap in scholarship by collecting and analysing a corpus of GA’s Facebook status updates on climate change in order to shed light onto this under-researched issue.
To-date, however, little is known about how GA frames its climate change communication, especially on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), such as Facebook.
Abstract While UN reports indicate increasingly dire consequences of climate change, the political will to initiate rapid decarbonization is lacking, as nations fail to meet targets set by international agreements.
Framing the climate crisis: Dread and fatalism in media and interest group responses to <scp>IPCC</scp> reports · 2023 · DOIKok-Chor Tan (2015) argues against obligations to change one's lifestyle to become carbon-neutral since the political effects of this remain uncertain.
To address this gap in the literature, this article reports on a survey-based experiment testing two framings of uncertainty about the causes and effects of climate change—one with a high level of uncertainty and one with a low level of uncertainty—on students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours related to climate change.
Textbooks of doubt, tested: the effect of a denialist framing on adolescents’ certainty about climate change · 2021 · DOIOne important yet understudied tactic is the effort by CCCM groups to use open records laws in scientifically uncertain areas to cast doubt on the accuracy of scientific information.
This paper addresses these gaps in understanding by using an exploration of the state-based efforts and mobilizations to regulate the chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA) to identify and analyze the dynamics of interactions between scientists and activists as they collaborate in pursuit of movement objectives.
Collaborative Frame Construction in Social Movement Campaigns: Bisphenol-A (BPA) and Scientist–Activist Mobilization · 2013 · DOIHowever, no studies have explained why Hansen's scientific communication in this deliberative setting was more successful than his testimonies of 1986 and 1987.
Accommodating Climate Change Science: James Hansen and the Rhetorical/Political Emergence of Global Warming · 2013 · DOITo address this gap in the literature, this research examines two measures of environmental concern, awareness of environmental threats and willingness to sacrifice, emphasising former state socialist countries both in comparison with countries around the globe and across countries located within this regional block.
Environmental Concerns in Cross-National Context: How Do Mass Publics in Central and Eastern Europe Compare with Other Regions of the World? · 2012 · DOIStudies of the social bases of environmental concern over the past 30 years have produced somewhat inconsistent results regarding the effects of sociodemographic variables, such as gender, income, and place of residence.
Citizens’ perceptions of the costs, benefits, and distributive consequences of these policies are key factors shaping their attitudes, yet how these dimensions interact remains insufficiently understood.
Further, limited literature has discussed both the “collective” nature of these impacts, while also examining their inequitable nature from an intersectional lens.
Climate change and the collective: understanding climate change through the lens of collective trauma and ecological systems theory · 2026 · DOI
Most-cited papers in Climate Change Communication and Perception
- Climate anxiety: Psychological responses to climate change · Journal of Anxiety Disorders · 2020 · 1,131 citations
- Development and validation of a measure of climate change anxiety · Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2020 · 961 citations
- Personally Relevant Climate Change · Environment and Behavior · 2011 · 591 citations
- Critical climate justice · Geographical Journal · 2021 · 537 citations
- The social consequences of conspiracism: Exposure to conspiracy theories decreases intentions to engage in politics and to reduce one's carbon footprint · British Journal of Psychology · 2013 · 476 citations
- Climate anxiety, wellbeing and pro-environmental action: correlates of negative emotional responses to climate change in 32 countries · Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2022 · 441 citations
- Climate anxiety: What predicts it and how is it related to climate action? · Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2022 · 327 citations
- On the nature of eco-anxiety: How constructive or unconstructive is habitual worry about global warming? · Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2020 · 325 citations
- The role of climate change risk perception, response efficacy, and psychological adaptation in pro-environmental behavior: A two nation study · Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2020 · 311 citations
- How psychology can help limit climate change. · American Psychologist · 2020 · 304 citations
Most recent work
- Building communities of hope is the central task of climate educators in the 21st century · Oxford Review of Education · 2026
- Rethinking education and training for the climate: individuals, systems, narrative skills and economic transformation · Oxford Review of Education · 2026
- From information to action: climate literacy, everyday practices, and the diffusion of climate services in urban Ghana · Regional Environmental Change · 2026
- What Influences Climate Risk Communication? Evidence From 25 Climate Leaders in 18 Global South Countries · Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management · 2026
- Post-Politics, Climate Movements, and the Problem of Radical Status-Quoism · Polity · 2026
- Climate change response profiles and digital behavior: cluster-based insights from Spanish young adults · Sociological Spectrum · 2026
- Communicating the Evidence: Understanding Individual-Level Responses to Increased Transparency of the Evidence in Evidence-Informed Policy · The American Review of Public Administration · 2026
- Voices of the Future: rhetoric, myth, and science in children’s climate discourse · Oxford Review of Education · 2026
- Tourists’ climate change denial? A view from Norway · Tourist Studies · 2026
- Cold Facts on the Influencer Hotline: A Digital Field Experiment Investigating “Hot” and “Cold” Processing of Greenfluencer Content · Media Psychology · 2026
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