Building a Climate-Literate Workforce: Impacts of a Comprehensive Public Utility Climate Change Education Program

Abstract

Combating climate change demands broad societal understanding and action. A key question is how effectively the private sector can enhance their employees' climate knowledge, attitudes, and actions to advance their corporate sustainability goals. Our paper presents the development and assessment results of a comprehensive, science-based climate change education program for all employees at a large U.S. public power utility. A robust pre-post climate literacy survey of participants included attention to variables that contributed to the program's success, which helps to fill a gap in the literature by demonstrating demographic-dependent improvements in climate literacy. Results of the quasi-experimental assessment demonstrate the overall effectiveness of the initiative for increasing participants' climate knowledge (+12.7%, p < 0.001) and attitudes (+6.0%, p < 0.001) (n = 560). Baseline climate literacy varied significantly, primarily based on employees' education level, gender, and rural or urban work location. These differences contributed to variability in the program's effectiveness among cohorts, with the most substantial differences in literacy gains based on their level of education. Employees especially valued educational components that were interactive and relevant to their local communities. Our results suggest that climate change education has the potential to improve employees' climate literacy, but may be best served with multiple education strategies that would be more inclusive across employee groups.