Abstract
Communities that are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change need to adapt to increase their resilience. Effective government policies and plans are a key component of this transition, but they are not sufficient in themselves. The community needs to be made aware of the risks, acquire knowledge about the options that are available for a response, and be empowered to take their own actions. Effective public engagement is therefore key to success in planning for climate change. This paper focuses on the importance of public engagement in climate change adaptation policy. It undertakes a systematic quantitative review of the literature dealing with the core themes of climate change awareness, knowledge, and engagement in policy-making. The findings reveal a gap in the existing academic literature on public engagement, its impacts on different types of knowledge, and the integration of both into climate change adaptation policy. In addition, findings show a strong link between public knowledge and engagement that can be used to encourage and motivate the public by using behavioural economics as a policy instrument. The paper also makes a useful contribution by identifying more effective strategies to improve climate change resilience and sustainability.
Highlights
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has drawn attention to the impacts of climate change being felt across the world in the form of events such as floods, rising sea levels, storms, droughts, heatwaves, bushfires, etc
This paper focuses on this relationship and addresses the research question: “How can public awareness, knowledge, and engagement improve climate change adaptation policy?” A systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR) was conducted to identify the emerging themes, the main points of contention, and research gaps that are most relevant to the role of public engagement in the climate change policy development and decision-making processes
The SQLR analysis indicates that 47% of the articles explored climate change adaptation and 17% were focused on climate change mitigation
Summary
Climate change has become one of the key drivers in many natural disasters. Climate change poses a major challenge for policy-makers and governments need to generate broad public support for an effective response [2–5]. Raising public awareness and knowledge of the risks amongst residents in vulnerable communities is crucial [6]. The Productivity Commission [7] (p.5) describes effective climate change adaptation as “actions that enhance community wellbeing” where wellbeing includes economic factors such as income, wealth and consumption as well as quality of life factors such as health, environmental amenity, leisure, community participation, and political rights and freedoms. Owen [8] measures effectiveness of climate change adaptation using five indicators: reducing risk and vulnerability, developing resilient social systems, improving the environment, increasing economic resources, and enhancing governance and institutions
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