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Communicating Climate Change: Reinforcing Comprehension and Personal Ties to Climate Change Through Maps

ABSTRACT Although climate change is highly prevalent in the media, people in Europe and the United States are often unsure about climate change terms, processes, and its personal consequences. In other words, climate change communication seems to be largely failing so far. Among other communication tools, maps are widely used for explanatory purposes by scientists and the media. Here two questions arise: first, whether high map complexity may be too intricate to be understood and discourage people from deciphering the map; and second, whether personal interest in climate change can be influenced by the phenomenon depicted or the map’s scale. In a survey conducted among 109 students in the USA, 63% of respondents preferred a simple map, but a substantial subset, 37%, asked for complexity to receive more information. Regional phenomena evoked more concern than far-off phenomena (concern level index difference of 0.93 on a 5-ranked Likert scale). The advantage of maps showing local areas could not be statistically confirmed.