Health Professionals as Advocates for Climate and Health Solutions: The Influence of Social Norms on Health Professional Engagement in And Public Support for Climate Advocacy

To address climate change, climate-friendly actions and policies must be implemented. As highly trusted sources of information about climate change and health, health professionals are poised to have an exceptionally important impact on institutional climate-friendly actions and policies through advocacy. Despite this positionality, efforts to engage health professionals in climate advocacy are relatively new and little is yet known about how to do so effectively or how the public perceives such engagement. I conducted a survey experiment (Study 1) with medical societies and field experiments (Study 2) with advocacy organizations to investigate if social normative appeals help encourage health professionals to engage in climate advocacy. I also conducted a survey experiment (Study 3) to examine if normative information and the type of advocacy influences public perceptions of climate advocacy. Across Studies 1 and 2, I found mixed results surrounding the effectiveness of social normative appeals to engage health professionals in climate advocacy, with descriptive normative appeals showing the most promise. Lastly, in Study 3, I found that trust in health professionals as sources of information about human health and climate change increased after exposure to the experimental conditions, with interactions occurring by condition for trust as a source of climate information. Normative information had a main effect on perceptions of health professionals’ credibility, the type of advocacy had a main effect on perceptions of the acceptability and appropriateness of the action taken, but no interaction effect was found between the two. Together, the findings provide insights into the use of normative appeals for advocacy engagement, guidance for practitioners looking to further engage their membership on climate change and health, and deepened understandings about how the public perceives climate advocacy.