UC Merced

Chapter 1: An overview of the human dimension of the climate crisis that details the urgency of developing adaptation solutions that benefit communities already being impacted.

Chapter 2: Marginalized UCM students from the San Joaquin Valley were paired and asked to discuss multiple climate change related prompts. Recordings of the discussion were analyzed. Findings reinforced knowledge that students learn climate science information better when it is presented in a culturally salient manner. Expertise in addressing the effects of the climate crisis was found among farmworkers. Findings suggest areas of cross-cultural communication research that should be expanded on to improve an understanding of the climate crisis on diverse populations.

Chapter 3: Recognizing that climate science is presented to the public as a political issue, a study was designed regarding ideological messaging. Research on ideology typically scores individuals on inventories that place the individual on static scales and assigns the individual to ideological groupings. The approach in this study was to use mouse tracking to create an implicit measure of the decision making involved when participants define ideologies according to a set of ideological traits. The result was a mutated Left-Right scale that represented the ideological landscape as viewed by a population.

Chapter 4: The effects of the climate crisis are inevitable. This chapter explored three areas of applied, community engaged research developed in conjunction with other lines of research over the last several years. Research education programs are used to improve the success of marginalized students, increasing the presence of marginalized people in academia. Mediating organizations are a method of balancing the power of academic institutions when negotiating research agreements with community organizations. Data archives controlled by indigenous communities are proposed as a method of preserving scientific data, financing the futures of the communities, and as a long-term process of transferring ownership of data to indigenous communities.