The Role of Communication Framing in Agricultural Climate Action

This article investigates effective communication strategies to enhance farmers’ engagement with climate change mitigation. Through an online survey experiment of more than 500 Irish livestock farmers, it examines the impact of message framing—focused on reputation concern or expenses—on information engagement, knowledge, and intentions to adopt greenhouse gas mitigation measures. The findings reveal that while framing significantly reduces engagement with the information, it does not affect knowledge or implementation intentions. This underscores the complexity of motivating climate action, suggesting that advisory programs should employ positively framed messages to generate interest, despite challenges inherent in discussing climate change mitigation.