Assessing Public Attitudes about Climate Change

In April 2008, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Center for Excellence in Climate Change Communication Research at George Mason University invited a group of experts to discuss measuring public attitudes toward climate change. Prof. Arno Scharl presented the Media Watch on Climate Change (www.ecoresearch.net/climate), a public Web portal that aggregates and analyzes news media coverage on environmental issues. The meeting took place in Washington, DC and focused on how much we know, and don't know, about public perceptions, and the quality of the evidence that currently exists. In July 2008, the Bowman Design Group (www.bowmandesigngroup.com) published a report that summarizes the meeting's key findings.

The report brings the perspectives of researchers and communicators together in an informal assessment of the state of current knowledge about public attitudes and recommendations for future research. Participants from the research community and federal agencies represented three main approaches toward research and communications: Political Attitudes Research, Behavioral Research, and Climate Literacy Education.

With an increasing sense of urgency, policymakers, news media and the public are confronting climate change. Today's decisions will determine the long-term severity of climate change impacts upon the environment, the global economy, and civil society. Decision-makers would benefit from a thorough understanding of public attitudes and behavioral influences as they evaluate possible responses and interventions. This also requires new methods to track indicators of attitudinal and behavioral change. The Department of New Media Technology's Media Watch on Climate Change, developed within the FIT-IT Semantic Systems Project IDIOM (www.idiom.at), aims to develop and test such methods based on natural language processing and visual analytics.

Contact

Prof. DDr. Arno Scharl, MODUL University Vienna
Department of New Media Technology, Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Vienna, Austria
arno.scharl@modul.ac.at | www.modul.ac.at