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This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including a new installment of Yale and George Mason’s long-running “Climate Change in the American Mind” study + new polling on voters’ relative trust in each party to handle climate change, the environment, and other major issues. 

Learn about an evidence-backed framework to engage your key audiences and build buy-in from your supporters. In 2021, we kicked off a round of research project collaborations to study how climate advocates can leverage the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) to better organize and mobilize their bases. SIMCA predicts that people participate in activism when they feel that their social group is experiencing injustice, when they strongly identify with that group, and/or when they feel that acting together could have an impact (that is, a sense of collective efficacy). These collaborations helped us unpack SIMCA and provided a better understanding of how and when to use this model. We found that SIMCA-informed messaging tended to perform as well as or better than existing approaches, though the specific context of each implementation was important for determining exactly how this played out. In part 2 of this report-out, we feature research done in collaboration with three climate justice organizations: Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Alianza for Progress, and Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts. (Also see our practical guide for integrating SIMCA into climate engagement programs and check out the projects from our SIMCA Part 1 webinar)
 
 

The “Before Action Review” is a series of questions for a team to answer together to improve their collective project. The five questions are: What is our intended result? What are our success measures? What challenges will we face? What did we learn from last time? What do we think will make us successful this time? The “After Action Review” is a similar set of questions to digest together, as a team, after a project attempt: What is our intended result? What were our actual results? What caused our results? What lessons should we take forward for next time? These kinds of collective planning and processing create the conditions for people to develop their: knowledge — information or understanding gained from experience or education; skills — the ability to do something that comes from training, experience, or practice; and wisdom — the ability to contemplate and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including a major new Pew report on Americans’ attitudes about climate, environmental, and energy issues; new polling on the West Virginia v. EPA decision; a new peer-reviewed paper on the language of climate change from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication; and new polls focusing on Latino voters and voters in Western States.

Texas is back in the news this week because the state faced record temperatures that almost crashed its power grid. Well, earlier this year, Justin Rolfe-Redding at the Lab wrote about the upcoming Valentine’s Day campaign #BreakUpWithGas. The campaign was designed to push back on disinformation and use the one-year anniversary to galvanize public attention to the problem with fossil fuels. That Texas freeze in 2021 resulted in hundreds of Texans losing their lives and more than half of the state was without power or water service for days. Now it’s time to revisit that campaign and see what they/we can all learn.