A Study on the Synergistic Effects of Media Coverage and Environmental Public Policies on Public Environmental Awareness and the Mechanism of Pro-environmental Behavioral Transformation

Against the dual-carbon strategic background of China's ecological civilization construction, media coverage and environmental public policies jointly shape public environmental cognition. This paper adopts a mixed-methods design combining text content analysis with an offline questionnaire survey and builds on agenda-setting theory, the theory of planned behavior, and the social amplification of risk framework. Taking waste classification and air pollution governance as typical cases, it aims to explore how media reports and environmental policies synergistically influence public environmental awareness, and to unpack the internal psychological mechanism that transforms awareness into stable pro-environmental behavior. The findings indicate that media amplify environmental risk perception while policies provide institutional constraints and incentives, and that their joint effect significantly promotes public environmental participation. However, fragmented media narration and insufficient policy publicity tend to produce a disconnection between awareness and action. This study enriches the interdisciplinary framework of environmental communication and offers optimization suggestions for environmental governance publicity.