People around the world are not getting important information about their health because it is siloed as an environmental topic. Health journalists can help fill that gap. A review paper published in October summarizes the global literature published on climate-health communication between 2000 and 2023. The biggest take-home point is the need for more climate-health communication.
Some climate communication research assesses awareness, while other studies assess motivation to engage with policy change or individual mitigation strategies. Below is a summary of the most important points the review makes with regard to health journalism.
Framing matters, but so does context
Many studies indicate that communicating about the health implications of climate change reaches more people than the traditional environmental framing of the issue, but context also matters. For example, when health framing was included alongside counterframes that deny climate change, it was far less effective, especially among conservatives — a fact that few journalists will find surprising.
Nevertheless, other studies found some effective angles: For example, justifying renewable energy transitions with air pollution reductions rather than climate change mitigations gained more support among American conservatives. Another study showed that climate change skeptics increased their support for policies reducing carbon emissions once they encountered information about the related increase in dengue and mosquito-borne illnesses. Another study found that communicating the climate change-related increase in health care costs on a per-household basis to be more effective than larger national-level cost numbers.
While reminding people of their own health vulnerabilities can reduce their sense of agency and motivation to deal with climate change issues, a solutions-oriented frame can mitigate that hopelessness. Narrative-style formats perform better among populations studied than instructive explainers. Fear-based messages and images have greater reach, but often backfire because audiences respond negatively. Images that show real people dealing with climate issues (rather than staged photos of politicians or activists) are more relatable and motivating but don’t spread as far and wide as images that incite fear. A study in the United Kingdom showed that imagery of air pollution was particularly motivating and concerning to research participants.
Overall, information on how climate change affects health, when presented alongside solutions and a demonstration of large-scale action, is compelling to audiences. However, such messages are mostly only reaching audiences that engage specifically with environmental news. If health journalists do not fill this gap, large swaths of the public won’t connect the dots between climate change and health, even as their situation worsens.
The most-studied locations: The U.S., U.K. and Canada
U.S. audiences have been studied the most, and although most Americans have some understanding that climate change affects health, they are often unable to name specific ways that climate change does so or who is most likely to be harmed. Nevertheless, American audiences are at least demonstrating improvement on this front.
U.K. audiences also demonstrate widespread awareness that climate change adversely affects health, especially regarding air pollution and flooding. Yet there are still large numbers that do not recognize that climate change is already affecting their health or lack information on specific issues.
Canadians are more informed than Americans about the health implications of climate change, but that’s not saying much. While just over half of Canadians can name specific ways that climate change harms health, that number has not improved over the course of a decade.
What is known from the Global South
While studies throughout the Global South seem to indicate better awareness of climate change and its health implications, only studies in India and Malta used nationally representative samples that can be generalized to the population at large.
In India, just over half of respondents understood that climate change would worsen disease epidemics, and just under half understood that it would cause food shortages.
Among the studied countries, Malta has very high awareness of climate change and its health implications, with a whopping 89% of study respondents acknowledging that climate change can cause illness and nearly two thirds recognizing that it is happening now.
High variability in awareness among the most vulnerable
Despite a lack of research with representative studies, research in African countries seems to indicate widespread recognition of climate change and at least some of its health effects. For example, Indigenous women in Uganda were aware of changes in seasonal food security and how that affects the health of expectant mothers and infants. Some studies elsewhere demonstrated low awareness — for example, among millennials and Gen Z participants in Romania, where they understood that seasons are changing but hadn’t connected that to health. A study in China showed that outdoor workers there were generally not aware of heat risks. Alpine Swiss and German pulmonary center patients were overall unaware that they were more vulnerable to climate change than healthy tourists.
Knowledge gaps
Only 93 studies across the world fit the criteria for this review. Of those, only six were not in English, and only 11 used nationally representative samples. Clearly, that leaves wide gaps in what researchers know about climate-health communication. Studies that specifically research vulnerable audiences such as low-income communities, populations in the Global South, ethnic and racial minorities, women, children, people with chronic illnesses and outdoor workers are needed. Health journalists may be able to engage with these subgroups within their audiences to assess what information these populations particularly lack.
