Heterogeneity in individual adaptation action: Modelling the provision of a climate adaptation public good in an empirically grounded synthetic population

Abstract

Adaptation to climate change depends to a significant extent on behavioural change in the form of individual adaptation action. We investigate the case of urban neighbourhood activation for the support of the elderly during the more likely occurring extreme heat waves generated by climate change. The proposed integrative theoretical consideration makes on the one hand reference to social dilemma theory and on the other to concepts from behavioural theory and social psychology. The case context is particularly challenging because it involves intra-individual dynamics of psychological processes, inter-individual dynamics of social influence and environmental dynamics governed by future climate scenarios. To account for the spatial and temporal dynamics of social mobilisation the proposed methodical approach is agent-based modelling. The presented social simulation experiments obtain their empirical grounding from a fine grained set of socio-geographic data for the target area which groups the population according to sociological lifestyles in a spatially explicit way. Simulation results show that social mobilisation of neighbourhood support can be substantially inhibited because passive habits establish quicker than prosocial behaviours which require successful social coordination prior to becoming habitual. In contrast, an alternative scenario simulation reveals that a time-limited intervention can provide an enlarged temporal window of opportunity for cooperative habits to stabilise and to persist after the end of the intervention.