Date released: July 30, 2024
The report “Climate Change’s Four Irelands” identifies four different audiences of people in Ireland who share a similar set of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours relating to climate change. These are:
30th July 2024: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has today published Climate Change’s Four Irelands’ an audience segmentation analysis of the Irish population. The report identifies four audiences within the Irish public who share similar sets of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours relating to climate change. The Alarmed (34 per cent), Concerned (48 per cent), Cautious (14 per cent), and Doubtful (4 per cent) strongly differ on their knowledge, levels of worry and willingness to take personal action on climate change. The findings are consistent with the previous assessment published by the EPA in 2022.
This work was undertaken by the EPA and the Yale University Program on Climate Change Communication, in support of the National Dialogue on Climate Action, and provides an update on the ‘Climate Change in the Irish Mind’ project.
Welcoming the report Dr Eimear Cotter, Director of EPA’s Office of Evidence and Assessment said:
“Climate Change’s Four Irelands shows that more than four out of five people in Ireland, across all regions and backgrounds, are either in the ‘Alarmed’ or ‘Concerned’ category. The small percentage in the ‘Doubtful’ category shows that climate scepticism is rare in Ireland."
She added;
“People from cities, towns, villages and rural areas hold diverse views on climate change, but the study does not show a strong urban-rural divide. In relation to our attitudes to climate change, more unites us than divides us.”
The report shows that a majority within each climate change audience agrees that climate change is happening. While awareness of climate change is very high, there are strong differences in what the audiences believe is causing it. Climate change is mostly caused by human activities, however, a significant minority of the ‘Alarmed’ and ‘Concerned’ audiences incorrectly believe that climate change is caused equally by human and natural action. The ‘Alarmed’ audience feels most knowledgeable about climate change, followed by the Doubtful.
Speaking about the report Mary Frances Rochford, Programme Manager said:
“Successfully addressing the challenge of climate change requires a diversity of messages, messengers and methods that reach each of these four audiences and must be tailored to meet their particular needs. This analysis provides a useful framework to help climate communicators identify and understand their target audiences to engage the public more effectively about climate change and solutions.”
Insights from the segmentation report support climate policy and decision makers, climate educators and communicators across Irish society, including government, agencies, local authorities, academic institutions, environmental organisations, businesses, scientists and the media.
Contact: Niamh Hatchell, EPA Media Relations Office, 053-9170770 (24 hours) or media@epa.ie.
Note to Editors:
Wave one of this study from 2021 identified four distinct audiences among the Irish public based on views about climate change. This report updates how these different audiences are represented in the Irish population using the findings of Wave 2 of Climate Change in the Irish Mind.
Audience segmentation is an approach that identifies different groups of people with shared characteristics for engagement and communication. A statistical technique called latent class analysis (LCA) is used to identify patterns in respondents’ answers to climate change questions. These patterns identify groups of people who share a similar set of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. This can support prediction, explanation and understanding of unique groups and can provide insight into how to craft more effective public communication strategies and activities.
The ‘Climate Change in the Irish Mind’ project is an ongoing study of the Irish population’s beliefs, attitudes, policy preferences and behaviours regarding climate change. The project aims to develop a better understanding of the Irish population by conducting an ongoing study of climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, policy preferences and behaviours of the Irish public towards climate change. Wave 1 of the project revealed near nationwide agreement on many climate change attitudes and strong majority support for climate action.
This work was undertaken by EPA and our academic partner Yale Program on Climate Change Communications (YPCCC), in support of the National Dialogue on Climate Action.
This is the first nationally representative survey of its kind in Ireland which is now in its second wave. The approach to the project is based on the established methodology of the “Climate Change in the American Mind” survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Centre for Climate Change Communication, which was tailored to meet Ireland’s particular socio/economic context.
The data in this report are based on a representative survey of 1,330 residents of the Republic of Ireland, aged 18 and older. The survey was fielded by Behaviour & Attitudes between the 30th of August to the 6th of October 2023. All questionnaires were administered by call agents using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) software. The survey took, on average, 25 minutes to complete.
Survey respondents were recruited using a random digit dial sample of live Irish telephone numbers. About 80 per cent of survey respondents were reached through mobile phone numbers and 20 per cent through landline phone numbers. A total of 22,862 numbers were dialled and 1,355 interviews were completed (including 25 pilot interviews to test survey wording and timing), for a response rate of 6 per cent. Gender, age, work status, and region quotas were used to ensure sample representativeness. Key demographic variables were also weighted, post survey, to match Central Statistics Office norms.
The next report in this series will be an updated mapping tool that allows accessible exploration of the climate attitudes, beliefs and climate policy support intentions of the Irish population down to a county level. The release of this tool is expected later this year. Full details of all Climate Change in the Irish Mind reports maps and analysis are available on the EPA website.
