Frankston Climate Change Community Survey

Case Study

In November 2019, Frankston City Council declared a Climate Emergency. In 2020, Point Advisory was engaged to design an online climate change survey in close collaboration with Council staff aiming to gather community sentiment, ideas, priorities and actions to work together to meet the Climate Emergency. The feedback and ideas collected through the survey will help inform the update of the Council’s Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Plan and will help Council understand the best ways to work with the Frankston City community to address climate change locally.

Our approach

When framing and presenting the online survey, special consideration was given to positive and solution-focused climate change communication that is sensitive to the audience and their wellbeing. We were mindful when designing the survey to not only focus on the negative impacts of climate change but also ask about the positive actions that community members (as well as Council) are already taking or would like to take to address climate change. Throughout the survey, we deliberately chose language that facilitates connection to place, the Frankston City municipality, as well as the Frankston City community. As the survey was distributed to a variety of community members, we avoided complex technical or crisis-laden language so as not to disengage community members. Where necessary, technical terms were introduced and explained in ways that were easily understandable by a general audience.

About the survey

The survey was conducted from July to September 2020. Community members were asked to respond to 18 questions about their individual climate awareness and action, about climate actions they think Council should prioritise and what else Council and the community can do to act on climate change. We received 762 online responses to the survey and a total of 610 people completed the survey in full – a result we were very pleased with.

The majority of survey respondents were local residents (80%), female (62%) and felt ‘quite familiar’ (53%) with the topic of climate change. Generally, there was a high level of concern amongst respondents, with 80% stating that they are ‘extremely concerned’ or ‘very concerned’ about climate change. When looking at the overall level of concern about climate change, it is notable that a greater proportion of younger respondents are ‘extremely concerned’ about climate change when compared to older respondents. None of the youngest respondents (aged 12 to 18 years) reported they were ‘not concerned’ about climate change.

You can read more about the survey in the summary report on the Frankston City Council website

If you have any questions about this project and the services we can provide around climate change community engagement, don’t hesitate to contact Sarah Beattie-Smith or Amélie Uhrig