Climate Change Risk Appraisal and Adaptation—Behavioural Processes

Abstract

Climate change is caused due to human interference with nature, natural resources, and their unsustainable consumption patterns and lifestyles. Hence, it is important to know what humans think of, feel about, and wish to do about this problem. Cognitive analysis assesses the knowledge base and awareness level of respondents about various dimensions of climate change. It also includes people’s perceptions and basic factual knowledge about climate change issues as being understood by them. The climate change perception is represented as a joint function of the objective environmental conditions (for example, population density, temperature, pollution levels) and the individual characteristics of the person (for example, adaptation level, previous experience with climatic events, etc.). However, just having awareness and risk perception is not enough as one has to move ahead on the path of ‘Climate walk’ besides merely being involved into ‘Climate talk’. The chapter focuses on how different models of risk appraisal can be globally adapted to facilitate behavioural adaptation with climate change in diverse global perspectives in addition to reflecting the need for systematic research regarding climate risk appraisal and perception for future extreme weather events in diverse geo-climatic regions/countries, to take it further.KeywordsClimate risk appraisalBehavioural adaptationPerception