Making sense of what enables and what constrains adaptation to climate change

Abstract

As a first step in responding to new phenomena such as climate change people need to make sense of these new phenomena. Social representations theory suggests that people first anchor new phenomena to what they already know and then through processes of social interaction such as conversation or engagement with public media, people objectify this anchored representation in the form of an image, metaphor or symbol. This objectification makes the phenomenon familiar and part of common sense. As such the objectified phenomenon is added as a new social object to the group's world. The social representations form an important underpinning feature of how people respond to phenomena such as climate change. The process of making sense of phenomena such as climate change is thus very much a social process and we need to understand how this process occurs in order to effectively model people's responses. In a similar vein, to understand how people respond to climate change we need to make sense of how they make sense of the situations they face; what enables and what constrains their ability to adapt to climate change. These enabling and constraining factors need to be understood as objects within the social world. Making sense of new phenomena is a highly complex process. As society grapples with making sense of climate change and having to adapt to climate change it is very difficult to predict what social objects will emerge and become objectified. This is a truly difficult situation to model. To build models of the social dimensions of climate change we will need as a first step, to be able to model this highly complex sense making process through which groups within, and society as a whole come to terms with climate change and what enables them to adapt to climate change. In this paper we describe some preliminary results from our investigations of sense making in relation to climate change and climate change adaptation among different social groups. Our data compromise almost 1000 narrative fragments of people's personal experiences of what enables and what constrains adaptation to climate change. We present some preliminary findings of patterns in how society in Australia and Canada, are making sense of adapting to climate change. Respondents in our survey revealed characteristics of their narratives and their own relationship to their narrative as well as a number of characteristics of themselves. We present preliminary results of mixed methods analysis of word association and narrative fragment data on what people think of in relation to climate change and in which factors help and which hinder adaptation to climate change. An important conclusion emerging from our preliminary analyses of the data was that there was no one consensual representation either of climate change or the factors that enable or constrain adaptation to climate change. The paper concludes by identifying some opportunities and difficulties that our analyses present for modelling the social dimensions of climate change.