Previous research by the Program of Applied Research on Climate Action and the Environment (PARCA) team has found that Canadians generally display poor understanding of the relative impacts of different pro-climate actions and have gaps in their understanding of climate change. Following up on these findings, a randomized controlled survey-experiment was conducted in December 2023 to test the impact of several behaviourally-informed interventions on climate literacy outcomes. Results suggested that 3 interventions—the Consensus, Concrete, and Combined conditions (described below)—were most effective in increasing people’s awareness about climate change and the impacts of pro-climate actions.

To understand the efficacy of climate literacy interventions in the real world, this study is testing the effects of these 3 different kinds of messages on climate literacy outcomes (specifically awareness of climate change and adaptation and mitigation behaviors) among users of a partner organization’s social media channels. The partner, the Canadian Association of Science Centres (CASC), shared the intervention posts (in the form of visually engaging graphics including the information for each condition) and accompanying quiz questions on their ScienceUpFirst (SUF) social media channels. The conditions are as follows and were presented in the following order, with 2 weeks between them to reduce carryover effects (note random assignment was not possible and the same users may have participated in multiple conditions):

1. Passive control/baseline: no graphics/intervention materials presented, only the 4 quiz questions evaluating climate literacy;

2. Consensus condition: Highlights the social and scientific consensus about climate change and climate action;

3. Concrete condition: Describes specific pro-climate actions and their relative impacts;

4. Combined condition: Combines information from the consensus and concrete conditions and some more general information about climate change.