Abstract
Climate Change is the most important threat to our society and all species on Earth. Large alterations in the climate are affecting every aspect of our society and in order to limit this impact we must decarbonize the economy before 2050. Although science presents solid evidence on the magnitude of the problem and outlines precisely the consequences, people do not act accordingly and do not consider this issue a priority for their survival. The reason behind this paradox might be a non-appropriate Social Representation of Climate Change in society as the Social Representation conditions and forms the response of the society. In this paper, we extend previous investigations of how this Social Representation is formed in order to find ways to improve it through a Massive Online Open Course on the Science of Climate Change. Using a validated questionnaire, we investigated the knowledge dimension of the Social Representation of Climate Change in a group of students of a MOOC on Climate Change. A pre- and posttest revealed general improvements in all the categories that were considered in this study. A detailed analysis showed different degrees of improvement for different groups, providing new insights in the efficiency of knowledge-based online courses. Well designed Massive Online Open Courses, based on scientific evidence, targeted to the general public might improve the Social Representation of Climate Change, which may in turn trigger awareness and an effective mobilization to address this important and urgent topic.
Highlights
Climate Change is the most important threat to humans and all species on Earth [1]
The results are grouped according to four areas which correspond to the four basic questions used to design the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs): “What is Climate Change? (Physical processes)”, “What are its causes? (Causes)”, “What are its consequences? (Consequences)” and “What can we do? (Responses)”
This question is extremely relevant since Social Representation (SR) are considered a main driver for climate action [68,69] and misconceptions in this SR may be the reason behind the slow response of society despite the urgency indicated by scientific evidence [68,70]
Summary
Climate Change is the most important threat to humans and all species on Earth [1]. A vast collection of scientific evidence shows fast and fundamental changes of the climatic conditions compared to preindustrial times where conditions remained relatively stable during the last 10,000 years, allowing the development of our current civilization. A higher frequency of extreme weather events, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones or wildfires [3], is observed and has been related to Climate Change. These, and other evidence [4], have led to a unanimous consensus among the scientific community on the importance of Climate Change and the need to have a better understanding of what is happening so that a rapid global response can be created
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