Marketing the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus : Testing Message Effects with American College Students

This book addresses questions such as: How can we strategically and effectively communicate the WEF Nexus to the public to raise necessary public awareness and supportive attitudes, avoid unnecessary politicization, and secure public resources to cope with the water, energy, and food issues before they drastically deteriorate?

This book helps readers understand the persuasiveness of popular message levels (agenda, knowledge, attitude, and behavioral intention) and factors (sidedness, conclusiveness, and gain- or loss-framing) in communicating critical environmental issues, particularly the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus. The WEF Nexus is a relatively new environmental concept that has been deemed by leading scientists and international organizations as an effective solution to water, energy, and food shortages and crises. It is vital to garner sufficient public support for the concept to function. This book addresses questions such as: How can we strategically and effectively communicate the WEF Nexus to the public to raise necessary public awareness and supportive attitudes, avoid unnecessary politicization, and secure public resources to cope with the water, energy, and food issues before they drastically deteriorate? How can some commonly used message factors affect the persuasiveness of the WEF-nexus strategic communications, and how may those communications be processed by the audience? These questions are answered with data from the National College Student Science Literacy Survey (NCSSLS), a relatively representative survey of American college students in 2016-2018, with a survey experiment included in its second round.