Climate change scepticism and its impacts on individuals’ engagement with climate change mitigation and adaptation to heat in Hong Kong: A two-wave population-based study

Abstract

To characterize public climate scepticism in Hong Kong, China, and investigate its associations with emotional and behavioural engagement with climate change and adaptation to heat we conducted a two-wave randomly sampled population-based survey in 2020. The 1st wave, conducted in spring and early summer, was to characterize patterns of climate change scepticism, and the 2nd wave, conducted during the hot mid-summer asked the same participants, about climate-related anxiety, pro-environmental behaviours, sustainable intention, attention to heat-related information, perceived heat-related health risk, and heat protection behaviours. Among our sample of 1705 Hong Kong adults, we identified five latent classes of climate scepticism: “low scepticism” (24.9%), “attribution and impact scepticism” (20.9%), “social response and impact scepticism” (18.3%), “extensive scepticism” (18.2%), and “pessimistic scepticism” (17.7%). Compared with the “low scepticism” class, the “social response and impact scepticism” class, who were more likely to be better-educated middle-aged males and more socio-economically privileged, behaved less sustainably. For heat adaptation, compared with the “low scepticism” class, the “attribution and impact scepticism” class, an older and less-educated group, perceived lower heat-related health risk and adopted fewer heat protection behaviours. Our study highlights the value of more nuanced understanding of audience segmentation based on the multiple dimensions of climate scepticism to inform climate change communication strategies.