PCLM-D-25-00292

Do low-income groups respond more positively to “climate justice” than to other terms from the public discourse about climate change and sustainability? Evidence from a representative Los Angeles County sample.

PLOS Climate

Dear Ms. Blyler,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

As you will see, both reviewers expressed major concerns with this manuscript as is. That said, given the interesting and salient research question and potential, I am wiling to consider a revised manuscript provided that the authors takes very seriously the reviewers' constructive feedback and comments. Please consider with care both the substantive and conceptual issues raised as well as methdological questions and suggestions from the reviewers.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 27 2026 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Lily Hsueh, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Academic Editor, PLOS Climate

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.-->

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Partly

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-->2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?-->

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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-->3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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-->4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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-->5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #1: This paper analyzes the familiarity of different climate change concepts among Los Angeles residents. The authors use a survey of Los Angeles residents that asked how familiar they are with different concepts such as “climate change”, “climate justice”, and “global warming”. The authors also analyze whether respondents with more familiarity of the concepts are more likely to support some policies that decrease climate change. Additionally, the paper explores whether responses to “climate justice” are more favorable among low-income residents.

The paper poses an interesting question: how does knowledge on climate change impacts the likelihood to support climate change mitigation policies? However, I have several concerns related to the limitations of their data and analysis, as well as the framing of the paper. The following paragraphs describe these concerns.

1. Framing: the authors examine whether familiarity with the term “climate justice” differentially affected the willingness to consume less red meat. I think that the authors selected that question to proxy for “willingness to support climate change mitigation policies”. The authors indeed mention that they assess willingness to consume less red meat because red meat has a large carbon footprint and reducing its consumption will mitigate climate change and its unequal impact on low income communities. However, this specific policy choice has some issues. For instance, lower meat consumption is an individual action that respondents might perceive as having limited impact on reducing climate change. It could be the case that respondents do not believe that supporting this policy will effectively reduce climate change, and they might support other wide-ranging policies like renewable energy or cap and trade programs (both existing in California) that they believe could be more effective at reducing climate change and its impacts on low-income communities. Therefore, it is hard to believe that exploring willingness to consume red meat actually is an adequate measure of climate policy that could reduce climate change among low-income communities. Providing more context on the decision to choose this measure or literature that uses this measure would strengthen the paper.

2. Education level: The papers offers a descriptive analysis of the familiarity of different climate change-related concepts across different income levels in Los Angeles. The authors examine the familiarity of the concept “climate justice” compared to other concepts such as “climate change”, “global warming”, “climate crisis”, and “climate emergency”. The authors find that low-income populations are less familiar with these concepts. While the comparison by income is important, I would have expected that most of the differences in familiarity are explained by education level, less so by income. It would be helpful to explain why income is the main variable examined and not education level.

3. Sample validity: I have two main concerns of both the external and internal validity of the sample. First, Table 1 shows that the survey sample has a larger share of low-income residents and higher education level than the LA Census average. It would be helpful to explain whether the differences in sample composition could affect the overall interpretation of the results among the Los Angeles population. It would also be helpful to explain if there are any potential limitations of choosing Los Angeles as case study for interpreting the results at the national level. The authors mention this as a limitation in the discussion but do not explain how this sample selection issues could affect the interpretation of the results. Additionally, it would be helpful to add two additional columns to Table 1 with the national UAS sample and the national US census data.

4. Spanish speaking: it was surprising to learn that only 3% of the sample selected the survey in Spanish. The authors attribute this to Spanish-speaking U.S. residents being also proficient in English. The authors could test if that is the case for their sample by calculating the share of Hispanic respondents that selected filling the survey in Spanish vs English.

5. Interpretation of results: One of the main results of the paper is that “climate justice” yielded the lowest percent of participants who expressed willingness to consume less red meat. I believe this result comes from the last panel of Table 3. While the authors are correct that climate justice has the lowest share of participants who expressed willingness to consume less red meat (81%), the differences are relatively small compared to the other climate-related terms (i.e. climate change had the second lowest share of participants willing to consume less red meat with 83%).

6. Discrepancy between objective of the study and research question. The discussion section says “we examined whether climate justice may be more familiar and elicit more response among residents of Los Angeles County, which is more prone to climate-related disasters, leans more pro-environmental, and has larger income inequalities than most of the United States”. However, the paper does not compare LA County to other areas. It might be helpful to reframe this objective to reflect the actual research question of this paper.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript addresses an important and timely topic by examining how different climate-related terms, particularly climate justice and related framings are interpreted. However, it does not yet fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria. Key issues remain regarding consistency in the description of the study design, and transparency in the methods and analysis. As currently written, the conclusions are not always appropriately bounded by the data and analytic approach.

The statistical analysis lacks sufficient rigor and justification. The manuscript reports multiple separate ANCOVAs across several dependent variables without explaining the rationale for this approach or indicating whether corrections for multiple comparisons were applied. This raises concerns about inflated Type I error rates. In addition, the description of dependent variables, income group definitions used in ANCOVAs, and alignment between table descriptions and reported results require clarification and correction.

The authors appear to comply with PLOS Climate’s Data Policy.

The manuscript is generally written in clear and intelligible English. While there are grammatical errors, repetitive phrasing, and sections where wording could be improved for precision, these issues are correctable during revision and do not prevent understanding of the manuscript.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Comments.pdf

Do low-income groups respond more positively to “climate justice” than to other terms from the public discourse about climate change and sustainability? Evidence from a survey-based wording experiment with a representative Los Angeles County sample.

PCLM-D-25-00292R1

Dear Ms. Blyler,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Do low-income groups respond more positively to “climate justice” than to other terms from the public discourse about climate change and sustainability? Evidence from a survey-based wording experiment with a representative Los Angeles County sample.' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team.

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Diogo Guedes Vidal, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.-->

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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-->2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.-->

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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-->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?-->

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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-->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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-->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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-->6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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-->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.-->

Reviewer #2: No

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