Abstract
The consequences of climate change can involve various ambits and be very severe. For this reason, the social perception of climate change is a fundamental issue since it can influence the decisions of the policymakers, by encouraging or discouraging political, economic and social actions. In this paper, a sample of 300 interviews, collected through a standardized questionnaire and carried out among two municipalities located in southern Italy, was exploited to investigate the perception of climate change. Specific issues, regarding perceptions about climate change, concerns about its impacts, level of information, behavior and actions, exposure to extreme natural events and trust, were addressed to give answers to the research questions: (i) Is climate change perceived by the population? (ii) What is the degree of the community resilience to extreme natural events and climate change? As the main findings, this survey highlighted that the spatio-temporal dimension affects population perception, suggesting that some issues, such as correct behavior towards the geosphere, the sustainability of anthropization processes, community resilience and disaster risk reduction policies, can be very central and useful to mitigate the effects of climate change in population and society. Moreover, climate change perception varies in relation to contextual factors, including media communication, socio-demographic characteristics of respondents, knowledge and education, economic and institutional factors, personal values and, finally, psychological factors and experience.
Highlights
Climate change represents a great challenge for these times
This study investigates the perception of climate change among the populations of two municipalities located along the Tyrrhenian side of Calabria
The present survey was carried out in Calabria as a part of a Research Project funded under the Agreement on Scientific Cooperation between the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) and the University of Malta (UoM)—Biennial Programme 2018/2019
Summary
The impacts of the climate tendencies can be severe in several aspects: health, agriculture, water availability, etc. One of the consequences of climate change is an increase in the occurrence of extreme events with several impacts. Temperature, winter freezes and heat waves can affect the safety of communities, causing serious health problems to people and huge damages to various economic sectors, such as agriculture and energy (e.g., in [1,2]). The tendencies in rainfall patterns can cause an increase in the occurrence of drought events, severe storms and floods, with consequences on agriculture, water resources and exposure to geo-hydrological risk with damages to population and properties. Climate change represents a necessarily interdisciplinary topic in which the traditional approach of the physical sciences can be usefully integrated with the contribution of the social sciences. The response to climate change requires social, political and cultural, as well as scientific, approaches [4]
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