Hungry from Change: Framing Food Insecurity as a Climate Issue
Open Access
- Author:
- Paolizzi, Katherine
- Area of Honors:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Amy Sentementes, Thesis Supervisor
Michael Barth Berkman, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- food insecurity
food security
political science
public health
nutrition
climate change
sustainability
framing
issue framing
survey research - Abstract:
- In this thesis, I explore two political issues that persist in the United States: food insecurity and climate change. Critically, these issues exist in tandem, as climate change poses an undeniable threat to global food security, the effects of which are already being observed (Myers et. al 2017; Wheeler & Braun 2013). Previous efforts to appeal to the mass public about the pervasiveness of food insecurity rely on emotional narratives about individuals enduring undeserved suffering. Instead, this study emphasizes a more structural frame of food insecurity by highlighting the undeniable connection between climate and the four components of food insecurity: access, availability, utilization, and sustainability. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, I investigate how individuals respond to framing food insecurity as a direct result of climate change. The findings mainly reveal that partisanship and age consistently affect how individuals perceive the importance of food insecurity, not its connection to climate change. However, when controlling for these and other demographic factors, climate change proves an effective means of altering perceived importance of food insecurity compared to other salient concerns. These findings imply that the climate change frame does not produce a universally appealing lens through which public attention to food insecurity increases, yet it does increase the relative importance for this issue for some social groups. Therefore, political elites may want to address systemic causes of food insecurity, though they may not want to draw attention to a polarizing issue like climate change when attempting to raise awareness.