Abstract

Climate change has evolved from a professional environmental scientific issue into a pervasive public social crisis in North America, profoundly reshaping the environmental cognition, value orientation, and behavioral decision‑making logic of young generation groups. North American young adults (aged 18–30) are the core group of climate public opinion dissemination, low‑carbon lifestyle transformation, and future environmental governance participation; their pro‑environmental behavioral intention directly determines the long‑term effectiveness of regional climate action and sustainable development strategies. In the digital media era, traditional offline environmental education and official climate publicity have gradually been supplemented and even replaced by decentralized, interactive, and visualized social media climate communication. Platforms including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X (Twitter) have become the primary channels for North American young people to obtain climate information, perceive environmental risks, and participate in public environmental discussions. However, existing academic research still has prominent theoretical and empirical gaps in the localized context of North America: most previous studies focus on the direct correlation between media exposure and environmental behavior, lacking systematic exploration of the intermediate psychological mechanism chain from social media climate information reception to behavioral transformation; secondly, few studies have distinguished the heterogeneous influence of different types of social media climate content (factual science content, emotional advocacy content, and interactive discussion content) on young adults’ environmental cognition and behavioral willingness; in addition, the moderating effect of individual climate skepticism, a typical attitudinal variable prevalent in North American social contexts, has long been ignored in mainstream empirical models. To fill the above research gaps, this study constructs a moderated mediation theoretical framework based on the Stimulus‑Organism‑Response (S‑O‑R) behavioral theory and environmental cognition hierarchy theory. Based on cross‑sectional survey data of 682 North American young adult samples (covering the United States and Canada), this study systematically explores the internal mechanism of social media climate communication affecting pro‑environmental behavioral intention, verifies the mediating roles of environmental risk perception and environmental concern, and further discusses the moderating effect of climate skepticism on the whole path. The empirical results demonstrate that social media climate communication positively and significantly predicts North American young adults’ pro‑environmental behavioral intention; environmental risk perception and environmental concern play continuous chain mediating roles between climate communication stimulus and behavioral intention response, realizing the transformation from external information stimulus to internal psychological cognition and then to behavioral willingness. Climate skepticism negatively moderates the first half path of the chain mediation model: for young adults with high climate skepticism, the positive driving effect of social media climate communication on environmental risk perception is significantly weakened, thereby inhibiting the overall generation of pro‑environmental intention. Multi‑group heterogeneity analysis indicates that female samples, urban resident samples, and higher‑education‑level samples show more sensitive psychological response and behavioral transformation effect to social media climate communication, which is consistent with the gender difference and social stratification characteristics of environmental participation in North American society. This study innovatively constructs a multi‑dimensional classification system of social media climate communication content in the North American context, reveals the psychological black box of digital climate communication empowering public environmental behavior, and clarifies the boundary condition of climate skepticism restricting environmental behavioral transformation. The research conclusions can provide localized empirical evidence and targeted practical strategies for North American environmental public communication, youth climate education, and social sustainable governance, and also provide a theoretical reference for global digital environmental communication research.

Keywords: North American Young Adults; Social Media Climate Communication; Environmental Risk Perception; Environmental Concern; Climate Skepticism; Pro‑Environmental Behavioral Intention; Moderated Mediation Model; Digital Environmental Governance

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