Abstract
The role of values in climate-related decision-making is a prominent theme of climate communication research. The present study examines whether forest professionals are more driven by values than scientists are, and if this results in value polarization. A questionnaire was designed to elicit and assess the values assigned to expected effects of climate change by forest professionals and scientists working on forests and climate change in Europe. The countries involved covered a north-to-south and west-to-east gradient across Europe, representing a wide range of bio-climatic conditions and a mix of economic–social–political structures. We show that European forest professionals and scientists do not exhibit polarized expectations about the values of specific impacts of climate change on forests in their countries. In fact, few differences between forest professionals and scientists were found. However, there are interesting differences in the expected values of forest professionals with regard to climate change impacts across European countries. In Northern European countries, the aggregated values of the expected effects are more neutral than they are in Southern Europe, where they are more negative. Expectations about impacts on timber production, economic returns, and regulatory ecosystem services are mostly negative, while expectations about biodiversity and energy production are mostly positive.
Highlights
The role of values, broadly conceived, in climate-related decision-making is a prominent theme of climate communication research, e.g., [1,2,3,4]
Our results showed that homogeneity of expected values was uncommon among both forest professionals and scientists
What we did find was a gradient in the expected values of climate change effects on forests and forest-related activities running from the north/north-east to the south/south-west, with the aggregated perceived value of the expected effects being neutral, or somewhat positive, in the north-east and negative in the south-west
Summary
The role of values, broadly conceived, in climate-related decision-making is a prominent theme of climate communication research, e.g., [1,2,3,4]. Scientists, it might be supposed, rely on slow thinking They are less likely to be influenced by values and affect: processes such as deliberation, experimentation, and peer-review help to ensure that this is so, e.g., [10]. If this is true, and no other salient and underlying psychological mechanisms are in play, we might expect groups of forest professionals to exhibit homogeneity of expected values at the individual level and polarization at the population level (Figure 1, top right), while no such effects would be visible among scientists (Figure 1, top left). By “homogeneity of expected values” (or “value homogeneity” for short) we mean the degree to which an individual’s aggregated valuations of the different effects of a certain object, process, or event—in this case the effects of climate change on forests and forest-related activities—are either positive or negative (Figure 1)
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