The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) is a research center within the Yale School of the Environment that conducts scientific research on public climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior at the global, national, and local scales. It grew out of a conference held in

Aspen, Colorado Aspen is a home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Pitkin County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 7,004 at the 2020 United States Census. Aspen is in a remote area of the Rocky Mou ...

, in 2005.

General

The program is led by Anthony Leiserowitz. As of 2017, it put out a daily 90 second audio program carried by around 350 radio stations, articles in the media, a series of monthly videos, and training to help television

weather presenters Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the t ...

and reporters discuss climate change. The organization conducts ongoing opinion polls of the American public on climate. Its climate change opinion polling has been described as being similar to the work of the Pew Research Center. YPCCC has collaborated with the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication to assemble a freely available

dataset A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of th ...

, which has been used to create interactive partisan climate opinion maps of the United States. These maps (also known as the Yale Climate Opinion maps) provide detailed information about "climate change beliefs,

risk perception Risk perception is the subjective judgement that people make about the characteristics and severity of a risk. Risk perceptions are different for the real risks since they are affected by a wide range of affective (emotions, feelings, moods, etc. ...

and policy support for climate-related policy at the state and local level." The YPCCC website also offers tips on how

activists Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fro ...

and everyday people can communicate more effectively about climate change. In July 2019, the organization suggested that discussing climate change more frequently with family and friends might be the most effective way of influencing US public opinion on climate.

Awards

In 2017 the program was given a "Friend of the Planet" award by the National Center for Science Education in 2017. In 2018, Leiserowitz and YPCCC researchers received the Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award, given by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. The award recognized "a new statistical method to downscale national public opinion estimates using multiple regression and post stratification (MPR) survey data collection methodology."

References

External links

* * {{Authority control Yale University Climate change organizations based in the United States Environmental organizations based in Connecticut Environmental organizations established in 2005 2005 establishments in Connecticut Climate communication