Environmental Science Communication for a Young Audience: A Case Study on the #EarthOvershootDay Campaign on YouTube

Abstract

Addressing global sustainability challenges such as climate change in democratic societies requires thorough political and societal debates. Science and environmental communication is needed to inform these debates. However, not all parts of society are equally reached by traditional science communication. In particular young people, especially without academic background, are often left out. The cooperation of science communicators with influencers on the video platform YouTube can be a way to convey scientific information and raise awareness for environmental issues with new young audiences. This case study looks at three videos from the campaign #EarthOvershootDay on YouTube by the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) Germany and the educational initiative MESH Collective. The focus of the analysis lies on the established success factors of communication through influencers—specifically authenticity, comprehensibility and storytelling—and how they play out in detail in the three exemplary videos. Besides the analysis of the videos, the study is corroborated by interviews with the producers and a comment analysis in order to include the perspective of the viewers. Our analysis confirms previous findings on science communication with influencers and illustrates the practical implementation of these findings. It shows that authenticity is a central aspect which is not disturbed through the presentation of scientific content. The storytelling approaches are tailored to the respective influencer and their style. The language and structure of the videos are simple and comprehensible, scientific arguments focus on selected aspects and are tied to examples from everyday life. The comments by the users support these findings with the majority of comments addressing the three aspects of our analysis being positive. However, evidence for an in-depth engagement with the scientific contents could not be found in the comments. The stated goal of the campaign to reach educationally disadvantaged young people was only reached to a limited degree according to the assessment of the producers. Additionally, the views of two of the three videos remained below the average for the respective channel. Taken together this indicates that cooperation with influencers might not be an “all-purpose tool” guaranteeing success for science communication.

Geonews: timely geoscience educational YouTube videos about recent geologic events

“…Statistics from the Pew Research Center (2021) show that 95 % of US young adults (18 to 29 years old) routinely use YouTube (Statista, 2020). The time that young adults spend on YouTube has increased continuously over the past few years (Kaul et al, 2020). Survey results from Wissenschaft im Dialog (2018) for Germany show that 42 % of 14-to 29-year-old viewers use YouTube frequently or very frequently to inform themselves about science.…”

“…This evidence shows that YouTube plays an increasingly important role in the learning habits of today's young people (Boy et al, 2020). Kaul et al (2020) argued that if environmental science communicators are serious in their efforts to reach young people, new strategies based on YouTube need to be devised. The results of this study support these conclusions.…”

Challenging the stereotype through humor? Comic female scientists in animated TV series for young audiences

“…Visual media is, by its very nature, a particularly accessible medium of communication, as even written and linguistic language is interpreted into visual images in the brain (Hüppauf and Weingart, 2007). Developing minds are more yielding to visual stimuli than adults (Kaul et al, 2020) hence why animated television shows for young audiences are easily comprehensible with high contrast color palettes (DeLong et al, 2012;Brunick and Cutting, 2014), short, slow paced episodes (Lillard and Peterson, 2011), and often contain captivating audio (Calvert, 2013). However, children's critical evaluation skills are inchoate and thus they are more likely to accept what they see on the screen as true (Harriger et al, 2021).…”

The Impacts of “A Plastic Ocean” Film on The Environmental Care Attitudes of Senior High School Students in Tangerang

“…As explained earlier, the hypodermic theory views media coverage as drugs injected into the audience's blood vessels and results in expected reaction (McQuail, 2016); (Bungin & Burhan, 2009); (Mansur et al, 2021). Allgaier et al, (2020) defines environmental communication as the application of communication approaches, principles, strategies and techniques to environmental governance and protection. In short, environmental communication is an exchange of environmental information, knowledge and even wisdom that leads to mutual understanding between parties.…”