The role of climate change education on individual lifetime carbon emissions

reductions, while waste reduction, food choices and home energy contributed 33%, 13% and 12% respectively of the achieved total carbon emission reductions. 4.1.2. Understanding how personal relevance and carbon emissions are related. Given that one of the goals of the course is to help students develop a personal connection between global warming and their lives, we explore the connections between participant beliefs and total carbon emission reductions through analysis of grouped data. In Fig 4, we show the relationship between individual carbon emission reductions with personal beliefs about how global warming will influence them or future generations. We find that participants who believe that global warming will harm them personally, or will harm future generations, have larger reductions in carbon emissions compared to participants who do not believe there will be a strong impact on them or future generations. Thus, it appears that in most cases, participants were at some level influenced by how they perceived the impact of global warming on their own well-being, or the well-being of future generations, when making personal decisions related to the environment. Further, of the participants who agreed (strongly agreed or agreed) to the statement, “I have personally experienced the effects of global warming.” their reductions in carbon emissions were 3.7 tons of CO2/year, while for the participants who did not agree with that statement (disagreed, strongly disagreed or neutral), their reductions were only 2.9 tons of CO2/year (see Fig 5). 4.2. Focus groups

Responses from focus group participants converged around two themes: the importance of daily decisions to mitigate their climate change impact and the importance of engaging their community through climate change communication. Examples of these themes from focus groups responses are provided below, together with relevant connection to the three predictor variables used to inform the course design. 4.2.1. Impact on daily decisions. A hallmark of conversations with graduates from the course was the consideration of climate in daily decisions. Fundamentally, focus group Fig 4. The reductions in carbon emissions (in tons/year) for groups based on their responses to the two questions about how global warming will affect them personally or future generations. The percentage of the total responses for that question is also given above each bar. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206266.g004 The role of climate change education on individual lifetime carbon emissions PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206266 February 4, 2020 10 / 23