The “Think-and-do Tank” Model: Action-oriented Climate Communication Research

ABSTRACT

Since its founding in 2007, the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication has pursued an approach to climate science communication that we call a “think-and-do tank” model. The “thinking” element involves strategic communication research intended to illuminate strategies to improve public engagement with climate change that, if applied at scale, will cultivate public and political will for climate solutions. The “doing” element involves translating these strategies into communication programs that engage the public and empower various communities of practice. We seek to identify trusted local voices in communities across America and support them as climate communicators with evidence-based communication tools. We illustrate the model with examples and suggest how other action-oriented science communication researchers can apply the approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Research to practice
• climate communication
• climate communication research
• George Mason University
• climate public opinion
• action-oriented research

SDG KEYWORDS:

• SDG 13: Climate Action
• SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
• SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals

Introduction

The focus of this special issue – “Care” – is a broad term with conceptual and concrete meanings. As a concept, it means valuing something – in this instance, the health and welfare of others; as a concrete action, it means looking after what we value. Like other readers of this journal, we value other people, other species, and the Earth itself, and our caring manifests in working to enable those we care about to thrive, reducing the threats that may harm them. While many threats abound, we at George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication recognize and respond to the existential threat of climate change, which threatens the survival of everything – and everyone – we care about.

The US-based George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication was founded in 2007 to develop and apply social science insights to help society make information decisions that will stabilize the Earth’s climate and prevent further harm. Since inception, we’ve pursued our mission through an integrated approach to research and practice that aims to be – and hopefully is – helpful at enhancing public engagement in the issue. When invited to contribute an essay to this special issue of Environmental Communication, we decided to share how we think about our work, with hopes it will have value for others in the environmental communication community.

The “think-and-do tank” model

Two key ideas – operating as a think tank, and Baruch Fischhoff’s (2007) notion of “non-persuasive” climate science communication – were central to how we thought about our work from the beginning. Think tanks are research institutes that seek to influence practice and/or policy through insight generation. Around the time of our launch, a senior member of a large Washington, DC-based think tank informed us that their organization devoted 50% of its fiscal resources to policy development and 50% to communication in support of their proposed policies; moreover, they asserted this was a common budget allocation among think tanks. Thus, the initial cornerstone of our work was the decision to devote equal attention to research and research translation.

Fischhoff’s insights were similarly foundational for us. Fischhoff is the Howard Heinz University Professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. In 2007, he argued that the success of climate change communication was needlessly undermined by two mutable factors: an inadequate focus on understanding audiences and an over-reliance on a solo practitioner model. He recommended systematic research to understand audiences better – specifically, identifying climate information most valuable to them – and creating communication responsive to their interests and concerns (rather than the communicator’s). Moreover, he argued for approaching climate communication as a team-based enterprise rather than as a solo endeavor, because different types of expertise offer distinct communication planning assets: climate experts know most about the causes, impacts, and potential solutions to climate change; social scientists know most about how people process information and how to make information useful; and communication practitioners know most about how to get information into the public sphere so that audience members have the opportunity to consider it, discuss it, and put it into action. Fischhoff argued that interdisciplinary climate communication teams that include distinct skill sets were most likely to be helpful. Thus, our think tank’s second and third cornerstones became a strong focus on audiences and an emphasis on creation of interdisciplinary climate communication teams.

Think tanks traditionally use communication to advocate for the application of their research. We choose a different approach: we build communication programs that enable trusted messengers – that is, messengers identified in our audience research as trustworthy – to communicate climate information our research suggests will be most helpful to audience members. This fourth cornerstone of our work is why we refer to our center as harnessing a “think and do tank model.” [Figure 1].

Figure 1. A conceptual model of the Center for Climate Change Communication (Mason 4C) think-and-do tank approach.

While our most important aim is to be helpful, as academics, we also seek to engage with and learn from others in the academic community. Operating with a “scientific realism” paradigm (Pavitt, 2000), our work draws on – and aims to contribute to – diverse communication literature including strategic communication (Myers et al., 2023; Roser-Renouf et al., 2023; Van der Linden et al., 2015), public health communication (Maibach et al., 2007; Hathaway & Maibach, 2018; Kotcher et al., 2019; Kotcher et al., 2018; Kreslake et al., 2016), science communication (Cook, 2022; Kotcher et al., 2017; Myers et al., 2015; Van der Linden et al., 2017), and environmental communication (Kotcher et al., 2017; Maibach et al., 2023). We conduct many types of communication research including: exploratory and descriptive representative sample surveys and qualitative interviews to assess knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, policy support, and source trust among various audiences (e.g. Leiserowitz et al., 2022), including motivationally coherent audience segments within broader populations (e.g. Global Warming’s Six Americas, Maibach et al, 2011), and to identify barriers and opportunities to reduce gaps between people’s attitudes and their individual and collective actions (e.g. Myers et al., 2017; Kotcher, Maibach, et al., 2021).; exploratory and hypothesis-driven message testing research (e.g. Myers et al., 2012; Kotcher, Feldman, et al., 2021); and field experiments to evaluate the impact of our and other organization’s climate science communication initiatives (e.g. Myers et al., 2020).

Examples of translating research into action

Our first attempt to operationalize a think-and-do tank model is arguably our center’s most successful initiative thus far – in terms of its impact on an important community of practice (TV weathercasters) and the American public at large. Our first Climate Change in the American Mind survey – conducted in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication twice yearly since 2008 – identified TV weathercasters as a highly trusted source of information about global warming by many Americans. In response, we conducted the first scientific survey of TV weathercasters in America to assess their views of climate change and their interest in educating viewers about the local relevance of global climate change (Maibach et al., 2010). Ironically, we found that US TV weathercasters were a community divided on the issue of global warming: approximately half were convinced that human-caused climate change posed a serious threat to their community and were interested in educating their viewers about the situation (but generally were not yet doing so through on-air reporting), while the other half were skeptical of climate science. In partnership with Climate Central (a non-profit science communication organization) and WLTX (the CBS-affiliated TV station in Columbia, South Carolina), we developed and pilot-tested Climate Matters, a localized climate reporting resources program for TV weathercasters. During the year-long pilot test, WLTX chief meteorologist Jim Gandy aired 13 Climate Matters stories, which, in turn, were shown to have helped WLTX viewers develop a more science-based understanding of the local relevance of global climate change (Zhao et al., 2014). Over the next several years, the program grew rapidly to support TV weathercasters in many other media markets; by 2014, we were offering the program to all interested TV weathercasters in every US media market. A randomized controlled test of Climate Matters found that approximately 6 min of localized climate reporting (three on-air segments) had a powerful effect on the viewers’ perceived relevance of the issue (Feygina et al., 2020). A national impact evaluation found that Climate Matters reporting had enhanced public understanding of the local relevance of climate change nationwide (Myers et al., 2020). As of 2022, approximately half of America’s TV weathercasters were participating in the project (n = 1,181), and on-air reporting about climate change had increased more than 100-fold since the national scale-up of the program began in 2012. Moreover, and importantly, by 2020, the US weathercaster community was no longer a community divided on the science of global warming, possibly in part as a result of a conflict analysis and resolution initiative that we also implemented in 2012 at the request of the American Meteorological Society (Maibach, 2021; Maibach et al., 2022), in addition to the ongoing work of Climate Matters and others in the meteorological community. [Figure 2].

Figure 2. Broadcast Meteorologist Elisa Raffa uses localized climate data and graphics provided by the Climate Matters program in her local weather television segments.

Climate Change in the American Mind surveys have also revealed that Americans place much trust in their doctors – and health organizations in general – as a source of information about global warming, perhaps especially conservative Americans (Leiserowitz et al., 2022). Yet, as recently as 2014, few Americans knew anything about the health relevance of climate change (Maibach et al., 2015). Our surveys of US public health department directors (Maibach et al., 2008; Roser-Renouf et al., 2016) and physicians (Sarfaty et al., 2014, 2015) found that, in large numbers, health professionals were already seeing the health impacts of climate change among their patients or in their community, and they felt the need to take action – including educating the public and policymakers – in response. These audience insights led us to develop the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health in 2017, initially in partnership with nine medical societies. The Consortium has now grown to include 50 medical societies, and in the process, the Consortium has helped incubate state-focused sister organizations in 25 states (Sarfaty et al., 2022). Our research team supports these organizations – and all interested health professionals – with research on how to effectively educate the public about the health harms of climate change (e.g. Kotcher et al., 2018), the health benefits of climate solutions (e.g. Kotcher, Feldman, et al., 2021), and how to talk about the opponents of climate action – most notably, fossil fuel CEOs, their lobbyists, and the politicians they influence (Kotcher et al., 2023). Although this initiative has not yet been evaluated, our successes to date in organizing and activating trusted voices to communicate about an aspect of climate change that is personally relevant to most Americans have already exceeded our expectations, and some preliminary data suggests the initiative is having a helpful impact on public understanding of the link between climate change and health (Kotcher, Feldman, et al., 2021). [Figure 3].

Figure 3. Members of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health gather in Washington, D.C.

Our research to practice approach may strike some readers as being rooted in an information deficit model of communication, an approach that has been vigorously critiqued by some in the science and environmental communication communities. We take a different view. We believe that communication crafted in response to what audience members think, feel, and value, delivered by messengers they trust, can produce important outcomes – including a more accurate understanding of the facts and the evidence that establishes them, an increase in supportive attitudes and issue involvement, and an increase in support for societal action to address the problems. This is not to say that this form of strategic communication is sufficient to address the world’s pressing planetary health problems, but we do believe the evidence proves it’s helpful in moving people and communities to a greater state of readiness to engage in informed decision-making.

Working toward evidence-based guidelines that can be shared and applied

Bob Hornik, in his book Public Health Communication: Evidence for Behavior Change (2002), concluded that under certain circumstances, public health communication campaigns can succeed in advancing crucial public health goals through some combination of influencing the people at risk of health harm, and the people around them – including those who develop helpful products, services, and policies to address the problem. Furthermore, he concluded that successful science-based public health initiatives tend to be “big messy campaigns” – meaning they are sustained communication efforts, involving many trusted organizations, with messaging that evolves in response to the evolving needs of the audiences.

Hornik’s conclusions raise important questions of relevance to our work: Are there evidence-based guidelines for developing effective communication initiatives that advance climate mitigation and resilience goals? If so, can these guidelines be rendered practical enough to be widely applied by the many organizations seeking to advance such goals? We’ve considered these questions extensively over our years working together because identifying and sharing such evidence-based guidelines might significantly leverage our efforts.

To that end, a team from our center drafted an evidence-based guideline for developing effective climate communication campaigns and another to guide behavior change initiatives. We have found successful climate communication campaigns – that share factual information about climate science and climate risk mitigation options – address one set of challenges, and helping people (and organizations) who wish to change their behavior based on climate science address a different set of challenges. The evidence-based guideline for communication campaigns is simple, clear messages, repeated often, by a variety of trusted and caring sources. The guideline for behavior change campaigns is to make the behavior easy, fun, and popular. We find these guidelines to be complementary, and productive, when applied together – as was the case in our work with TV weathercasters.¹

Broader relevance

The academic think-and-do tank model is relevant at any scale – from small (a single professor and some students) to large (involving many professors, students, and support staff) – and feasible even without large amounts of external funding, if external partners are involved. Our recently established “Research to Practice (RTP)” post-doc program is giving us insight into the scalability of the concept. Although our two RTP post-docs are only in the second month of their position, they are already finding themselves to be in high demand by a range of practice programs eager to have the support of a trained climate communication research expert, including a climate museum and a climate change and health equity fellowship program.

We welcome readers’ thoughts about this model and our broader record of intervention in the climate crisis. We’re heartened to see similar efforts growing and thriving elsewhere and hope it takes root at different scales around the world. Nothing less is at stake than all we care about.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our many student, post-doc, and faculty colleagues in the George Mason University Department of Communication who have been instrumental in contributing to our thinking and doing over the past 15 years including Mohamed Ahmed, Anne Nicotera, Karen Akerlof, Joe Witte, Xiaoquan Zhao, Chris Clarke, Sojung Kim, Richard Craig, Tim Gibson, Kathy Rowan, Jagadish Thaker, Bob Inglis, Alex Bozmoski, Neil Stenhouse, Justin Rolfe-Redding, Ashley Anderson, Mona Sarfaty, Rob Gould, Mindy Weathers, Brittany Bloodhart, Jennifer Kreslake, Lindsey Beall, Kristin Timm, Julia Hathaway, Mark Mitchell, Karmjot Randawa, Colin Nackerman, Beverly Harp, Nicole Duritz, Price Atkinson, Chelsea Henderson, Angela Larck, Adbanke Adebayo, Eryn Campbell, Amanda Borth, John Cook, Wendy Cook, Saahi Uppalapati, Margaret Orr, Lisa Patel, Patrick Ansah, Richard Amoako, Lia Zakkiyah, Doran Tucker, Neha Gour, Em Kohl, Nic Badullovich, Kathryn Thier, Julia Fine, and Josh Ettinger. We are also immensely grateful to our many colleagues at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (with special thanks to Anthony Leiserowitz, Lisa Fernandez, Jennifer Marlon, Geoff Feinberg, Seth Rosenthal, Sander van der Linden, Matthew Goldberg, and Matthew Ballew), Climate Central (with special thanks to Bernadette Placky), and Climate Communication (with special thanks to Susan Hassol). It does take a village.

Disclosure statement

We have no conflicts of interest to declare except that we are “all in” on helping communities, states, nations, and humanity writ large rise to the challenge of climate change – which may create unintended biases in our research.

Additional information

Funding

Our funders have included the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NASA, Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, Energy Foundation, Kresge Foundation, National Park Service, Johnson & Johnson, High Tide Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and individual donors.

Notes

1 A lengthy paper describing these guidelines, the theory and evidence that supports them, and how to implement them was recently published open-access in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science (Maibach et al., 2023). Rather than summarize the paper here, we encourage readers to download and consider the paper. We make no claims that these two evidence-based guidelines are comprehensive, but the feedback to date suggests they are helpful and practical.