Climate Action
Empowering Sunshine Coast Youth to Take Climate Action Through Social Media and Seaweed Restoration
PROJECT LEAD: DR ALEXANDRA CAMPBELL
SDG8: Decent work and economic growth; SDG11: Sustainable cities and communities
Underwater seaweed forests are disappearing at alarming rates from many subtropical and temperate reefs around the world, including the Sunshine Coast, where seaweed forests disappeared due to coastal development. Just like land forests, seaweed forests provide critical habitat and food to many fish, produce oxygen, and draw down carbon dioxide. The loss of seaweed forests has severe environmental, economic, and social impacts. Restoring seaweed forests could help address climate change through carbon draw-down and increase the resilience of marine ecosystems via biodiversity enhancement.
Most young people are experiencing some level of ‘eco-anxiety’ or ‘ecological grief’ from the loss of habitats such as underwater forests, due to climate change and other human impacts. This grief can often motivate young people to take constructive action against climate change and other destructive processes. Ecological restoration is an example of positive action that individuals can participate in as citizen scientists to contribute to solutions and reduce their eco-anxiety.
While recruiting citizen scientists can be challenging, social media offers a way for researchers to engage with and recruit volunteers from the community and can provide novel insights into the unique contributions made by young citizen scientists. This study deployed a 2-week campaign testing various content types and platforms to ascertain which will be most successful in signing-up youth as citizen scientists for seaweed restoration purposes.
In this project, we aimed to:
Develop a social media presence for the Seaweed Research Group across multiple platforms to test which types of posts from which platforms are most effective at recruiting young citizen scientists to participate in planned seaweed restoration projects.
Develop social media content with positive or negative spin featuring seaweeds, the marine environment or people, and test which are most effective at inspiring young people to become citizen scientists and help restore underwater seaweed forests on the Sunshine Coast during a recruitment campaign set to run in February 2023.
Methodology:
Establishing a social media presence for the UniSC Seaweed Research Group (Aim 1): We established accounts for the Seaweed Research Group on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. We developed ‘evergreen’ content for each platform in order to build a following between October 2022 and January 2023. Content was created during October and posted across four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok) approximately daily (for Instagram and Facebook) and with less frequency on LinkedIn and TikTok. The number of followers and interactions with posts was monitored across the platforms.
Comparing the performance of post types on recruitment of young people (Aim 2): - In order to test which types of posts are more likely to inspire young people to volunteer as citizen scientists, we developed posts with either a negative or positive spin and with either seaweed, people, or the environment as the focus of the posts. We have developed n=3 of each type of post (i.e., (i) positive spin, focus on people, (ii) positive spin, focus on environment, (iii) positive spin, focus on seaweed, (iv) negative spin, focus on people, (v) negative spin, focus on environment, and (vi) negative spin, focus on seaweed), resulting in a total of 18 distinct pieces of content. Each day, one of these pieces of content will be posted to Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok. On each day, which of the 18 pieces of content will be posted will be randomly selected (but on any given day, only one piece of content will be posted, and this will be consistent across all three platforms. Each piece of content will be posted only once throughout the 18-day campaign, which will begin on 1st and end on 18th February 2023. We will measure the number of young people who register their interest in becoming a citizen scientist to help us restore underwater seaweed forests on the Sunshine Coast by completing our webform, in the 12 h period following posting. We will also access other analytics provided by the social media platforms to further interrogate the effectiveness of each post.
Social Media examples created by youth researcher Shelby Schumacher. Watch them all here to see which ones impact you the most.
Impact and Extension:
The impact and extension of this social media recruitment drive will be to provide young citizen scientists with an opportunity to participate in a ‘seaweed restoration event’ and personally take action against climate change by helping to restore lost seaweed forests on the Sunshine Coast. In addition to helping have a positive impact on local marine ecosystems, citizen scientists can also opt in to being part of the experiment themselves.
There are emerging data suggesting that participating in restoration activities can improve stewardship behaviours and build the overall environmental ‘conscience’ of volunteers (e.g., Santori et al. 2021, Toomey et al. 2013) and may also be beneficial to participants’ physical and mental health (e.g., Husk et al. 2016, Cleery et al. 2017). We will test these ideas in willing citizen scientists by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative social research methods. Specifically, we will assess whether participation in restoration alters citizen scientists’ understanding of or attitudes towards marine environments, climate change impacts and seaweeds. Furthermore, we will measure various mental, physical, and microbial health indicators of participants prior to and following participation. Citizen scientists will be randomly allocated to treatment (active restoration) or control (exercise, no activity) groups and any changes in health indicators will be compared between these groups.
We anticipate that this work will directly lead to an academic publication on on the relative performance of different types of social media posts across different platforms on the recruitment of young citizen scientists. This will enable her to share her work more widely with the community and leverage this for a seaweed restoration event (planned for 2023) in which recruited citizen scientists will be able to actively participate in research as citizen scientists and subjects simultaneously.
One youth research team member was part of this project.