The Five Canadas of Climate Change: Using audience segmentation to inform communication on climate policy

Audience segmentation for climate change Perhaps the best-known and long-standing effort at climate change audience segmentation to date is found in the “Global Warming’s Six Americas’’ studies realized by the Yale and George Mason Program on Climate Change Communication [15]. To identify the six audience seg- ments, 36 variables assessing climate change motivations, behaviours and preferred societal responses of a nationally representative survey of U.S. residents were subjected to Latent Class Analysis. The six audiences identified by this method reflect quantitative shifts from high to low levels of concern, issue engagement and degree of certainty that global warming is occur- ring. Though some scholars have raised important concerns regarding the limits of audience segmentation as a tool of social marketing [23], the use of audience segmentation by climate change researchers has grown considerably [13]. For instance, the Global Warming’s Six Americas’ model has now been adapted and extended to India [24], Australia [14, 25, 26], Ger- many [16], Singapore [27], the Netherlands [28] and New Zealand [29]. Segmentation analyses have also been applied to other environmental issues, such as environmental protection [30] and worldviews [31], energy-related behaviours [32], and recycling attitudes [33] and behav- iours [34]. Given the central role ideologies, values and worldviews play in shaping individuals’ response to climate change information [1, 2, 6] audience segments could act as important

moderators of message framing effects. Such framing effects are thought to occur when pre- senting the same information in different ways (i.e., equivalency framing) or emphasizing par- ticular aspects of an issue over others (i.e., emphasis framing) causes citizens to alter their preferences [35–38]. Despite the implicit and explicit goal of audience segmentation studies to better communi- cate with specific audiences with tailored messages, there are still relatively few studies that use audience segmentation to empirically assess how specific audience segments respond to differ- ent types of climate change communications and interventions. Among the exceptions, Myers et al. [39] use the Six Americas segmentation model and demonstrate that framing climate change as a health issue elicited positive emotional reactions (e.g., hope) across a range of audi- ences, with such effects increasing in size when comparing the most dismissive to the most concerned audience segments. As a result, they suggest that a public health frame might bolster support for climate change policy. However, this study also found that a national security frame produced an unanticipated boomerang effect on the relatively less engaged audiences (i.e., Doubtful and Dismissive segments), highlighting the propensity of different audiences to react in a non-uniform manner to a given message. In another study conducted in Australia, Hine and colleagues [14] found that messages with strong negative emotive content increased

adaptation intentions in all three of their segments (i.e., Dismissive, Uncertain and Alarmed), while messages focusing on local impacts were effective at increasing engagement among dis- missive audiences only. While these studies underscore the importance of considering audi- ences in the process of climate change communication, the varying effects of message framing across audiences generally remain underexplored, especially in the Canadian context, where no study about climate change audience segments, to our knowledge, has been published to date. To the extent that public opinion on climate change varies across cultural, political and regional environments [40, 41], patterns of climate change segmentation are likely to diverge across cultural contexts [11]. As a result, the Canadian public is unlikely to segment into the same sub-populations as the U.S., German or Australian public. Furthermore, as Metag and Scha¨fer point out [42], existing segmentation studies differ considerably in the constructs, measures and analytical procedures used, which makes cross-study comparisons challenging. For instance, some segmentation studies are based on Latent Class Analysis [e.g., 29, 42], while others are based on Cluster Analysis [e.g., 16, 28], or Latent Profile Analysis [e.g., 14]. PLOS ONE The Five Canadas of Climate Change PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0273977 November 23, 2022 3 / 21