Introduction
The business world has learned to promote a lifestyle by focusing mostly on children with commercials in mass media, including radio, television, and social media. Because of this cultural shift and the emergence of hyper-consumption, the next generation is being conditioned to desire things they do not need, squandering resources that might otherwise be vital to the larger global society. Additionally, the very serious issue of a changing climate has been downplayed and even questioned by the same mass media, in contrast to other topics that are deeply ingrained in American society (Clayton & Manning, 2018).
However, by employing the same strategies that big businesses and other lobby groups use to market their goods, counterculture against excessive consumerism and climate change can be pushed to youngsters. One must also grasp the serious implications of climate change’s impending influence on the economy to comprehend the problem as a global one. It is essential to first understand what climate change globally is before examining its effects on the economy.
Impacts of Climate Change on the Global Community
The abuse of resources from the globe by humans has contributed to global climate change. This causes the global temperature to increase, which has an unfavorable impact on the world’s many ecosystems. In addition to harming ecosystems, global climate change also has a significant economic impact on several human groups around the world (Mason & Rigg, 2019). A shock is a change in how the world operates that is brought on by climate change. According to studies, many agricultural industries may collapse as a result of their incapacity to produce crops with an average worldwide increase of two degrees Celsius. The loss of existing agricultural output and agriculture will unavoidably affect the global economy.
Due to climate change, if there is a net loss of food and supplies in the globe, there will also be a slowdown in the global economy. Researchers discovered that a decline in economic growth is associated with climate change in a study to determine how the advanced nations of the globe will alter. They cite the optimum temperature of six degrees celsius, at which the majority of manufacturing occurs in the United States and the European Union, as the cause of this, explaining that the average world temperature has risen above that level (Ahmed, 2019).
As per Research Anthology on Environmental and Societal Impacts of Climate Change (2021), the estimated yearly loss from changing climate in the ecosystem was $539-1,322 billion globally and $58-144 billion for the United States, or 0.6% to 1.4% of GDP. Although the general public has begun to be concerned about the effects of climate change, many people do not comprehend it and are easy to discount it.
Instead of disseminating important environmental information to the public through its role as a gatekeeper of information, the mass media focuses on contentious issues that they are confident will increase viewership and, ultimately, revenue for their networks. Public service announcements (PSAs) highlighting the possible risks of climate change and strategies for encouraging social activity in the United States are hardly available to the general public.
A review of the Draft Fourth National Climate Assessment (2018) shows despite this being true, one may investigate how the public perceives the impacts of climate change as a result of information exposure by looking at other countries and their climate change messaging. After the 2005 Kyoto Protocol, stories in the Japanese media began to emphasize the consequences of global climate change.
These findings demonstrated that a rise in global warming media coverage had an immediate impact on the public’s knowledge of the issue, but this impact did not continue for more than a month. In times of a worldwide environmental emergency or other measures to counter the chilling effects of global climate change, the news cycles rotate such that global climate change is in the foreground for urgent public concern (Sarvajayakesavalu & Chareonsudjai, 2021). For our purposes, we may describe greenwashing as a marketing strategy employed in advertising to promote goods or services. Advertising can influence an environment for the better, even though it may also have harmful effects on the environment.
Campaigns for social awareness aim to communicate with certain populations. The call to action used in this kind of online advertisement would then enable altered group behavior. Advertising is a tool that social groups and NGOs may use to promote their causes. Similar strategies may be utilized to prevent climate change in young consumption culture, much as these other initiatives. The problem of juvenile obesity has been the focus of one of the biggest social awareness efforts in recent years (Mason & Rigg, 2019). Analyzing this awareness campaign enables one to have a better understanding of how different public service announcements could seem when distributed to the broader population via mass media.
Additionally, this program aims to encourage kids to alter their lifestyles and teach their parents to do the same. Their goal was to establish a brand with the tagline “VERB: It’s what you do.” Their campaign partnered “with well-known kids’ businesses, celebrities, and athletes and activities and items that are hip, exciting, and inspiring” to raise awareness of this company (Popovski, 2018). This campaign employed mainstream media as its informational medium, which allowed it to reach a large audience and significantly affect weight reduction. The “Let’s Move!” campaign, which tried to address the same issue by using mass media, was introduced by Michelle Obama as a follow-up to this successful public service effort.
During the first year of the campaign, there were six public service announcements on television and thirteen print ads. The 19 PSAs can be divided into several ad campaign sets, but they are all united by the same message and theme: the importance of eating well and being active (Clayton & Manning, 2018). According to a content analysis study, health messages were conveyed by adhering to the campaign’s overall theme, focusing on a specific audience, and demonstrating the desired behavioral changes rather than merely asking people to do so. Researchers discovered that the obesity campaign’s public service announcements (PSAs) all specifically target parents and children.
The PSA also aimed at the families of these children by demonstrating what mothers are doing to maintain their children’s health and giving advice on how to interact with their children so that they continue to eat well and be active. This “Let’s Move!” campaign was hailed as a complete success since it used a clear road map to convey its message to parents and children from a variety of social and economic backgrounds (Ahmed, 2019). Further, more than 76,000 calls about underage drinking were made to an 800 line, which gave the caller more details about nearby referral services (Singh, Singh, Rangabhashiyam, & Srivastava, 2021). These public service announcements and social awareness campaigns are successful because they employ a range of strategies to sway the target audience’s judgment.
One may go to social learning theory to discover how to mobilize a particular group of individuals best. When someone exhibits the preferred behavior, when someone verbally instructs them on how to change the desired behavior, and when someone creates a comic book character who exhibits the preferred behavior in the media, are the three ways that (Nesmith et al., 2020) claim that people can learn through watching the actions of others. By using how-to illustrations and verbal message reinforcement, these activities are demonstrated. In PSAs, they demonstrated actions that were simple to replicate and offered detailed instructions so that intended audiences could be trained without any guesswork. The possibility that the target audience would adopt the desired behavior modification might rise as a result of vocal assistance.
Conclusion
This similar strategy may be utilized to tackle global climate change, much as the health campaign that will primarily target adults and those who care for them. Public service announcement programs like this have a long-term impact on the public’s subconscious ideas through media consumption, even if they may not have an immediate impact. Public service announcement designers have modeled their work after this social learning idea.
Additionally, it focuses on destination factors, which are the behaviors that the message is intended to affect (Schlenz, 2020). This implies that the target audience must come into contact with the information and, after being exposed to it, must give priority to it, enjoy it, comprehend and draw lessons from it, agree with it, retain the knowledge and be able to access it in the future, and base judgments on it. The person must then follow through on that decision, get praise for it, and change their behavior as a result of the message’s lasting influence.
References
Ahmed, K. (2019). Decision Support Methods for Assessing Flood Risk and Vulnerability. IGI Global.
Clayton, S., & Manning, C. (2018). Psychology and Climate Change. Academic Press.
Mason, L. R., & Rigg, J. (2019). People and Climate Change. Oxford University Press.
Nesmith, A. A., Schmitz, C. L., Machado-Escudero, Y., Billiot, S., Forbes, R. A., Buckhoy, N., & Lawrence, L. A. (2020). The Intersection of Environmental Justice, Climate Change, Community, and the Ecology of Life. Springer Nature.
Popovski, V. (2018). The Implementation of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Routledge.
Research Anthology on Environmental and Societal Impacts of Climate Change. (2021). IGI Global.
Review of the Draft Fourth National Climate Assessment. (2018). National Academies Press.
Sarvajayakesavalu, S., & Chareonsudjai, P. (2021). Environmental Issues and Sustainable Development. BoD – Books on Demand.
Schlenz, S. (2020). Climate Change and Corporate Social Responsibility. GRIN Verlag.
Singh, S., Singh, P., Rangabhashiyam, S., & Srivastava, K. (2021). Global Climate Change. Elsevier.