Communicating Climate Change to a Local but Diverse Audience: On the Positive Impact of Locality Framing

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of locality framing in infographics about sea level rise as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). Our experiment sampled solely inhabitants of Hoek van Holland (HvH), a coastal town in the Netherlands for which future sea level rise is a pertinent issue. We analyzed the participants’ attitudes towards ACC mitigating behaviors, and found that an infographic with a local, HvH oriented frame had a higher positive impact on attitudinal change than an infographic with a more general, global frame. To account for demographic variation between participant samples in previous studies on locality framing, whose findings were inconsistent, we also tested if the observed effect of locality framing was moderated by gender, age, education level, income, political background, and religiosity. This was not the case. Our findings advocate for the application of local frames in ACC communication, irrespective of the target population’s demographic characteristics.