There is no “Planet B”. We are running out of time to take action for our planet. We can no longer avoid the harsh reality of the situation—in fact, the more we ignore climate change, the worse the situation becomes. Our world is experiencing an environmental catastrophe, and the first step to fixing it is raising awareness.

According to the European Union’s Climate-ADAPT Program, environmental awareness helps inform individuals about the impact of climate change. These individuals include business managers, organizations, and politicians who can heavily influence our response to environmental issues. Environmental education inspires people to respond in their community. Whether it is through building more sustainable habits or planting trees, people realize that climate change affects them and are united to reverse it.

This environmental awareness initiative can be enhanced by using advanced technology. A prime example of this took place in New York University (NYU) this month, where an international group of scientists developed an online tool that evaluates the success of climate messages. The tool was trained with a study that included 59,000 people from 63 countries. NYU wrote about the scientists’ tool, explaining that it scored the effectiveness of climate awareness messages depending on the audience. This audience description could include many specifics, such as political party, age, nationality, and annual income.

This tool is the first of its kind because it addresses a wide range of climate action solutions based on successful messages to its audience. In the past, similar solutions have only grappled with one environmental issue at a time when evaluating messages. This current tool from NYU is also more practical due to its wide range of data that spans multiple continents. Previous tools have mainly been applied to Western countries, making it tougher to use as a model for other areas of the world.

The tool tested many strategies for climate awareness messages: negative impacts of climate change, writing a letter about environmental action to a future generation, displaying scientific facts about climate change, etc. The results were very detailed—they gave specifics about how locations and demographics influence how climate messages are received. This could be useful when certain organizations or individuals want to gain support for climate action and legislation. By knowing what messages are most successful in a certain area, communication about climate change would be significantly improved and encourage a global effort against environmental issues.

All of the results were published in the Science Advances Journal and on NYU’s website, but here are some interesting takeaways.

“Asking participants to write a letter to a socially close child, as a member of the future generation, had the following effects: The intervention increased climate policy support in the following countries: the United States (10%), Brazil (10%), Ghana (8%), Russia (7%), and Nigeria (5%). The intervention decreased policy support slightly in the UAE and Serbia (3%) as well as in India (2%),” NYU reported.

“Among participants who used social media, willingness to share climate change information on these platforms generally increased in response to all interventions tested. Notably, the largest gains occurred after participants read facts about the negative impacts of climate change—a “gloom and doom” style of messaging. After hearing these messages, participants were 12% more likely to share pro-environmental messages on social media,” NYU said.

This tool is groundbreaking in terms of raising awareness about environmental issues. It is not only informative, but it also has the potential to bring the world together in the fight against climate change.

The NYU scientists advocate for the environment.