Twentieth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Climate changes now evidenced in a wide range of weather events including heat waves, floods, fires, and hurricanes have turned the public’s attention to the nature, range, and depth of our ‘eco-emotions”. Ecological issues are often though a “wicked problem” (Head, 2008) that affect the level of pro-environmental climate change mitigation and may affect civic participation. Evidence indicates that fewer than 3% said climate change was not a serious concern (Andi & Painter, 2020) with the vast majority (90%) of North Americans and Europeans are aware of climate change and 70% from 40 countries (Seyranian et al. 2022) reporting that climate change is a “very or extremely serious problem” (Andi and Painter, 2020). This is possibly why individuals and public concerns are often shared in social media platforms leading to increased hopes that the sharing information and experiences of climate change will lead to the increase of pro-environmental awareness and pro-environmental behaviors yet the climate change crisis is often perceived as unsolvable or very complex (Renouf, 2021, Jaeger and Wiley, 2015). Here we seek to decipher the role of social media in generating civic participation. Specifically, we consider ways that individual affordances and experiences of climate change at the private, community and global level provide additional insights to the promotion of civic participation. We show that sharing experiences in social networks increase civic participation but awareness has no significant effect. Additionally, climate change experiences shared at the community level and leading a pro-environmental lifestyle promote civic participation as well.