The Impact Of Climate Change Reporting Framework On Public Risk Perception And Environmental Behavior Intention

Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues concerned by the international community.As a sensitive region to climate change,China needs to take active measures to improve public’s risk perception of climate change and their participation in environmental protection.The mass media is the main source of public awareness and judgment of environmental issues,and plays an important role in the construction of public environmental awareness and the promotion of environmental participation.Therefore,from the perspective of environmental communication,this study aims to investigate how to organize reporting messages in different climate change reporting contexts,the groups with different consideration of the future consequence can further improve their climate change risk perception,adopt environmental behaviors and support environmental policies.This article adopts control experiment method,using framing effect theory and construal level theory as the main theoretical basis,2×2×2 inter-group experiments were carried out under the two scenarios of climate change affecting the country and affecting the world,respectively,to investigate whether there are significant differences in the persuasive effects of messages on public risk perceptions,environmental policy support,and pro-environmental behavior intention when the participant’s consideration of the future consequence,the gain-loss framing,and the reference points are different;and how to combine the three independent variables to produce better communication effects.The results of the study show that,firstly,the consideration of the future consequence positively predict public pro-environmental behavior intention and environmental policy support in both the national and global experimental contexts,and the consideration of the future consequences also positively affect public perceptions of climate change risk in the national experimental contexts.Secondly,the interactions of the independent variables on the dependent variable are significant in both national and global framing.In the national context,the consideration of the future consequence moderates the effect of self-future generation reference points on people’s pro-environment behavior intention,while the interaction with the gain-loss framing on environmental policy support is significant.In the global context,the consideration of the future consequence also moderates the influence of the self-next generation reference point on people’s pro-environment behavior intention,and there is an interaction between future outcome consideration,reference point,and gain-loss frame on public perceptions of climate change risk,for those with low degree of consideration of future consequences,the effect of loss framing-self generation reference point/loss framing-future generation reference point on risk perception is stronger;for those with a high degree of consideration of future outcomes,the loss framing-next generation reference point best promotes the environmental risk perception.This article explores the effects of differentiated communication strategies on people who with different levels of consideration of future consequences under different communication contexts,and the combination of strategies with the best communication effects for specific contexts and specific people.From the communication perspective,this article provides a reference for customizing environmental communication strategies and improving the effectiveness of environmental communication,meanwhile offers feasible suggestions for promoting public participation in environmental protection and mitigating climate change.