Program on the Environment

Climate change impacts everyone, regardless of race, age, education level, income level, and gender. Everyone needs to be included, and feel able to go to climate change events. Cascadia Climate Action (CCA) works to put events from different organizations in one main calendar so people can have easy access to climate change events. Along with their calendar they host events like Climate Science on Tap to educate people about different impacts of climate change. Even with the calendar and events like Climate Science on Tap (CSoT), CCA is looking to widen their outreach and get more diversity within people involved. I paid attention to the type of people attending events, sent out surveys to many different groups, including people who had attended CSoT. The aim of this study was to find out understand why people of different ages and education backgrounds don’t get involved in outreach. The data shows that a majority of participants were white, predominantly female, had attended higher education but had equal differences among age and education levels. Accounting for the fact that Seattle is a liberal thinking area, this data leads me to believe that to get more people involved it is important to include both a variety of panelists but also convey the information in ways that is easily understandable to people who have not studied climate change. The more understanding there is about climate change, the more likely society is to lessen the impacts and provide future generations a planet to live on.