Exploring Media Influence in Determining Forest Engineers’ Perceptions on Climate Change

Abstract

Global climate change is one of the biggest threats to the environment, with direct consequences for terrestrial life and human activity. Thus, the analysis of public knowledge regarding the importance, causes, and effects of climate change is entirely justified. Public knowledge about the phenomenon of climate change is influenced by the information available on the most accessible sources of information such as web sources, TV shows, and news. On the other hand, the perceptions of climate change are depending on many other individual cognitive factors such as the level of education, the professional background, or the direct experience with climate-change-related events. The main questions asked in this study were: How the human perceptions of climate change are shaped? What role has the media in shaping the perceptions on climate change? To address these questions, we have considered a pool of 76 respondents, with education in forestry, from three counties situated in the North-Eastern part of Romania. On the other hand, we have performed a search on several Romanian news portals using the keywords related to global change for the period 2009-2012. We have found 42 references about extreme weather events and their consequences (drought, floods, extreme precipitation, etc.), but only 19% of them were related directly to global climate change. While the mass-media contribution to the formation of beliefs in climate change was difficult to prove, the professional background and the TV consumption habits appear to better discriminate the respondents. We conclude that the beliefs in climate change may be a kind of fashion amongst the forest engineers. While their perceptions on climate change are formed individually using different TV and internet sources, they seem to be shaped at the end by the professional milieu of the respondents.