Affective Images of Climate Change

Climate change is not only a scientific phenomenon, but also a cultural one. Individuals’ opinions on climate change are often based on emotion rather than on scientific evidence. Therefore, research into the emotional characteristics of the imagery that the non-expert public find relevant to climate change is important in order to build a database of effective climate change imagery, which can then be used by scientists, policymakers, and practitioners in mobilizing climate adaptation and resilience efforts. To this end, we collected ratings of relevance to climate change as well as emotional arousal and valence on 320 images to assess the relationship between relevance to climate change and the emotional qualities of the image. In addition, participants’ environmental beliefs were measured, to investigate the relationship between beliefs and image ratings. The results suggest that images rated highly relevant to climate change are higher in negative emotional valence and emotional arousal. Overall, images were rated as being more relevant to climate change by participants with higher pro-environmental disposition. Critically, we have compiled the mean relevance, valence, and arousal ratings of each of these 320 images into a database that is posted online and freely available (https://affectiveclimateimages.weebly.com; https://www.nmu.edu/affectiveclimateimages) for use in future research on climate change visuals.