The appeal of climate program framing depends on climate beliefs: a conjoint survey experiment among US agricultural producers

Despite increasingly severe climate change impacts to US agriculture, a majority of agricultural producers are skeptical of anthropogenic climate change, limiting climate action in a sector with considerable potential for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Research has suggested that highlighting the co-benefits of climate action can increase climate change engagement, yet the efficacy of doing so has not been tested in climate skeptical agricultural communities. We first administered a conjoint survey experiment (n = 853) to test if agricultural producers prefer public climate change programs that emphasize climate co-benefits and then conducted a latent class analysis to measure how variation in climate perceptions affects program preference. Programs that emphasized co-benefits had higher levels of support overall; economic co-benefits elicited a stronger positive response to climate programs than social and environmental co-benefits. However, co-benefits framing was ineffective for the most climate skeptical producers. Conversely, the most climate concerned producers were strongly motivated by direct climate benefits, rather than co-benefits. Critically, our study illustrates the nuances of co-benefit efficacy to increase climate action among climate-skeptical populations. These results further our understanding of how climate co-benefits promote climate engagement and can be used to improve the design of climate programs.