Understanding Climate Change Perception and Knowledge in Bangladesh: A Review from a Non-global North Perspective

Abstract

This paper reviews the existing studies on scientific consensus on climate change within the framework of the gateway belief model which showed that majority of the existing studies on consensus messaging have focused and experimented in the global north. That led this study to explore public climate change perception and knowledge in Bangladesh from the existing research and examine whether the initiatives and interventions are required to be approached within the framework of the gateway belief model and thus, figure out the scope to test the gateway belief model to enhance public perception of climate change in Bangladesh. In order to identify the articles that align with the objective of this study and could answer the research question, the keywords “climate change perception” AND “climate change knowledge” AND Bangladesh were applied in Google Scholar database, and the prompt “climate change perception and knowledge of people in Bangladesh” was used in the Consensus (AI) tool, and the time frame was limited to the years between 2010 and 2025. The overall findings of the reviewed articles showed students’ perceptions of climate change vary between educational institutions in Bangladesh. Also, people that are experiencing the impact of climate change and living in high climate risk communities in Bangladesh have differences in climate change perception and knowledge due to several factors, for instance, cultural beliefs, education, economic situation, information gap, and so forth. This research concludes that in the developing country setting, explicitly Bangladesh, the gateway belief model could be tested by adapting to the localized settings applying social consensus and in-group consensus messaging to increase public perception of climate change and examine the effectiveness, which will provide a notion of whether or not the gateway belief model is relevant in the developing country context, namely Bangladesh.