The Climate-Health Communication Gap: Connecting the Dots to Drive Climate Health Action

Communicating the health impacts of climate change can strengthen public engagement with climate issues and generate support for climate action. Social media and online news are major sources of information for people around the world, yet the extent to which the health impacts of climate change are communicated through these mediums is unclear. We used a mixed-methods approach to measure the prevalence of climate-health messaging online and the communication strategies used to convey it. We deployed a support vector machine (SVM) classifier to identify climate-health content from 2.4 million English-language social media posts (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, and YouTube) and news headlines about climate change. We then conducted content analysis to identify the communication techniques used within the most engaged-with climate-health posts. We found that only 3.1% of climate change content mentioned any health impacts. The most frequently occurring health topics related to extreme heat, mental health, and diseases. We also found that nearly 60% of these popular climate-health posts were fear-based "doom-and-gloom" messaging. Less than 15% of posts included personal stories or provided actionable solutions - communication strategies proven to engage the public on climate change. Of the popular climate-health posts, 11% were skeptical of climate change. And posts engaging conservative audiences - an important demographic to mobilize for broad climate action - were nearly absent. This research highlights major opportunities to advance health-climate communication. By scaling up targeted, solution-oriented and actionable messaging, grounded in diverse narrative strategies and framings, communicators can design messaging that effectively engages the public on climate change.