Climate Change Beliefs Research Articles

Community-Centered Climate Planning

Problem, research strategy, and findings Places around the world already experience significant damage from climate change–related weather events, economic disruption, and health impacts, exacerbated by poverty, segregation, and inequitable infrastructure. Unfortunately, Texas provides a perfect illustration of these forces, with impacts made even more severe by a lack of climate planning. How can planners minimize harm and reduce risk, given the state leadership’s unwillingness to undertake climate planning? One place to start is to investigate residents’ climate change beliefs to understand whether they share the state’s climate antagonism and then use this information to shape a planning response. In this study, I analyzed a survey (n = 1,053) to ask: What are Texans’ perceptions of climate change, and how can planners use this knowledge to create strategies to catalyze climate planning? Respondents expressed strong agreement about negative effects of climate change and increased frequency of extreme weather. They believed that climate change is due at least in part to human activity, and they expressed robust support for climate-related planning activities. These responses sharply differ from the state’s approach. However, despite agreement about climate issues, respondents did not identify climate change as a major concern about the future. This contrast suggests an opportunity for new climate-related communication frames to bridge the gap between climate perceptions and planning action. Takeaway for practice These findings inform three recommendations: better connect climate change impacts to everyday concerns, including housing, air quality, and health; emphasize common ground about benefits provided by nature, especially related to health; and use community engagement to refine these frames. I propose that planners can accelerate climate planning by following the lead of other disciplines that emphasize human health impacts of the climate crisis. In addition, planners can strengthen climate planning by extending environmental planning’s use of local knowledge from environmental health, urban heat planning, and climate-related land use planning to climate planning more broadly.

Environmental Efficacy, Climate Change Beliefs, Ideology, and Public Water Policy Preferences.

Water is an unpredictable and often overallocated resource in the American West, one that strains policy makers to come up with viable, and politically acceptable policies to mitigate water management concerns. While large federal reclamation projects once dominated western water management and provided ample water for large scale agricultural development as well as the urbanization of the West, water engineering alone is no longer sufficient or, in some cases, a politically acceptable policy option. As demand for water in the West increases with an ever-growing population, climate change is presenting a more challenging and potentially untenable, reality of even longer periods of drought and insufficient water quantity. The complexity of managing water resources under climate change conditions will require multifaceted and publicly acceptable strategies. This paper therefore examines water policy preferences of residents in four western states: Washington, Oregon, California, and Idaho. Using a public survey conducted in these states in 2019, we examine preferences pertaining to infrastructural, education, incentives and regulation specifically examining levels of support for varying policies based on climate change and environmental efficacy beliefs as well as geography, demographic variables, and political ideology. Results show support for all water policies surveyed, with the exception of charging higher rates for water during the hottest part of summer. The most preferred water policies pertained to tax incentives. Some variation of support exists based on gender, education, environmental values, efficacy, state residency and belief in anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change denial is associated with diminished sensitivity in internalizing environmental externalities

espite a strong scientific consensus about the existence of anthropogenic climate change, widespread scepticism in the general population continues to exist. Past research has largely relied on self-reported behaviours or behavioural intentions when investigating downstream ‘behavioural’ consequences of climate change denial. As a consequence, there remains a large gap in the literature about how belief in climate change interacts with the pursuit of self-interested, environmentally harmful behaviours. To fill that gap, the present research uses a novel, experimental economic paradigm that allows to attach true environmental consequences to laboratory decisions. Based on ∼56 000 pollution decisions from 2273 participants in more than 30 countries, we find that belief in climate change meaningfully affects decision-making. Our results show that climate change scepticism predicts self-interested choices and showcases that sceptics have an insensitive acceptance of emissions, reaping benefits no matter how large the climate cost are or how small the personal benefits become. Therefore, our results critically augment meta-analytic evidence arguing that downstream behavioural consequences are small to medium in their effect size. We discuss the use of experimental economic paradigms as a crucial innovation tool for psychological research addressing people’s willingness to engage in climate action.

Climate-change beliefs and resilience to climate change in Bangladesh: is leadership making any difference?

Climate-change beliefs and resilience to climate change in Bangladesh: is leadership making any difference?

Anger consensus messaging can enhance expectations for collective action and support for climate mitigation

Media coverage of climate protests within the United States and internationally has shown growing public frustration about governmental responses to climate change. But what are the effects of conveying that people are angry? And how do they contrast with more traditional norm messages about climate policy support? Here, we investigate whether social norm messaging about collective anger can impact perceptions of consensus and public support for climate mitigation. In a pilot study and two survey experiments (total N = 1529), we find that relative to control messages, normative appeals that convey growing public anger about U.S. inaction on climate change (i.e., dynamic anger consensus messaging) can enhance Americans' consensus estimates of other Americans' climate-related beliefs and support for mitigation policy, and expectations for future climate-mitigating collective action. Moreover, exposure to a dynamic anger consensus message led to similar estimates of Americans’ policy support and belief in climate change as messages that explicitly conveyed public support for climate mitigation (Study 1) or consensus belief in anthropogenic climate change (Study 2). When tailored for a cross-partisan audience, anger consensus messaging was also effective in bolstering personal support for climate mitigation (Study 2). Notably, similar effects were observed across partisan groups. These findings suggest that, by signaling shared motivational states, emotion consensus appeals can enhance expectations for social change, with the potential to mobilize bipartisan support for climate mitigation.

Extrinsic and Existential Mortality Risk in Reproductive Decision-Making: Examining the Effects of COVID-19 Experience and Climate Change Beliefs.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has presented an immediate risk to human life around the world, climate change poses an arguably greater—although less immediate—threat to our species’ survival. Within the framework of life-history theory (LHT), this pre-registered study investigated whether extrinsic risk (i.e., external factors that pose a risk to an individual’s life, e.g., COVID-19) and existential risk (i.e., risks with outcomes that threaten the existence of humans as a species, e.g., climate change) had similar or different relationships with reproductive decision-making. A UK representative sample of 325 participants between 18 and 35 years of age was asked to indicate their ideal number of children, ideal age to start having children, and whether their desire for a child had recently changed. Participants were asked about their experiences of COVID-19 and given a series of scales with which to assess their beliefs about climate change. In support of LHT, the study found evidence that knowing people who had been hospitalized with or died of COVID-19 was associated with a greater ideal number of children. Conversely, there was no clear evidence of a relationship between climate change beliefs and reproductive decision-making. The repercussions for understanding how we interpret and respond to different forms of mortality risk are discussed.

Outcome expectancies moderate the association between worry about climate change and personal energy-saving behaviors.

This paper explores whether efficacy beliefs can alter the relationship between worry about climate change and personal energy-saving behaviors, controlling for climate change beliefs and socio-demographics. For this purpose, we used data from 23 countries that participated in the European Social Survey Round 8 (N = 44 387). Worry about climate change, personal efficacy, personal outcome expectancy, and collective outcome expectancy were each associated with personal energy-saving behaviors concerning either energy curtailment or energy efficiency. The results further show that outcome expectancies moderate the association between worry about climate change and both types of energy behaviors. Worry was more strongly related to energy curtailment behaviors among those with high levels of personal and collective outcome expectancy. A similar pattern was found for energy efficiency behaviors, which were more strongly predicted by worry about climate change when combined with high levels of collective outcome expectancy. These findings are relevant for climate change communication, especially informational campaigns aiming to lower overall household energy use.

The Climate Change Dilemma: How Cooperation Beliefs Influence Energy Conservation Behavior

Despite widespread belief in anthropogenic climate change and high levels of concern about its consequences, behavioral changes necessary to adequately address climate change appear difficult to achieve. This concern–behavior gap is often explained by the public goods character of climate change mitigation, which is associated with a high individual incentive to take a free ride when possible. This paper examines cooperation beliefs and their impact on individuals’ energy conservation behavior. Analyzing data from the European Social Survey, it appears that cooperation beliefs are rather low in Europe and that most people do not expect others to limit their energy use to help mitigate climate change. This low trust contrasts with individuals’ reported level of energy conservation behavior and the general high level of energy conservation in most European countries. This trust gap has important implications for pro-environmental behavior as high trust in others’ pro-environmental behavior fosters individuals’ attempts to save energy.

Influencing climate change attitudes in the United States: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Researchers interested in climate change communication have investigated how people respond to messages about it. Through meta-analysis, the current research synthesizes the multitude of experimental studies on this topic to uncover which interventions are most effective at influencing attitudes about climate change. The meta-analysis focuses on experimental studies that included a control condition and measured climate change attitudes among participants in the United States. After a large literature search, 396 effect sizes were retrieved from 76 independent experiments (N = 76,033 participants). Interventions had a small, significant positive effect on attitudes, g = 0.08, 95% CI [0.05, 0.10], 95% prediction interval [-0.04, 0.19], p < .001. Surprisingly, type of intervention was not a statistically significant moderator of this effect, nor was political affiliation. However, type of attitude was a significant moderator: the treatment-control difference in attitudes was smaller for policy support than for belief in climate change, indicating that policy attitudes are more resistant to influence than belief in climate change. Interventions that aimed to induce skepticism (e.g., misinformation) had a significantly stronger average effect on attitudes than did ones that intended to promote belief in climate change, suggesting that belief in climate change is more easily weakened than strengthened.

Health professional's willingness to advocate for strengthening global commitments to the Paris climate agreement: Findings from a multi-nation survey.

Health professionals have the potential to address the health threats posed by climate change in many ways. This study sought to understand the factors that influence health professionals' willingness to engage in climate advocacy. We hypothesized and tested a model with six antecedent factors predicting willingness to engage in advocacy for strengthening global commitments to the Paris Agreement. Using survey data from members of health professional associations in 12 nations (n=3,977), we tested the hypothesized relationships with structural equation modeling. All of the hypothesized relationships were confirmed. Specifically, higher rates of perceived expert consensus about human-caused climate change predicted greater climate change belief certainty and belief in human causation. In turn, all three of these factors, including higher levels of perceived health harms from climate change, positively predicted affective involvement with the issue. Affective involvement positively predicted the feeling that health professionals have a responsibility to deal with climate change. Lastly, this sense that climate advocacy is a responsibility of health professionals strongly predicted willingness to advocate. As a unique study of predictors of health professionals' willingness to advocate for climate change, our findings provide unique insight into how an influential set of trusted voices might be activated to address what is arguably the world's most pressing public health threat. Limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are presented, and implications for message development are discussed.

Measuring pro-environmental behavior using the carbon emission task

The present research introduces the Carbon Emission Task (CET) as a new behavioral paradigm grounded in experimental economics. It assesses consequential pro-environmental behavior in laboratory, online, or classroom studies. Participants face repeated tradeoffs between financial bonus opportunities paired with real carbon emissions and foregoing such opportunities while staying carbon neutral. In two studies, we find that people react systematically to the incentives set out in the task and that average pro-environmental behavior correlates with related constructs. Higher bonus prospects decrease pro-environmental behavior, whereas higher environmental consequences increase pro-environmental behavior. Average pro-environmental behavior in the CET correlates with environmental attitudes, belief in climate change, and demographic factors such as gender, education, or political orientation. Finally, average pro-environmental behavior in the CET predicts participants’ reported carbon footprints and their extraction behavior from a common-resource pool. Taken together, our findings suggest that the CET relates to constructs often used in psychological research, but due to its relationship with experimental economics may help to integrate the two disciplines and synthesize the research efforts. In addition, it opens the door for novel research questions testing behavioral reactions under varying sets of incentives. In sum, the CET offers the research community a fast and efficient tool to assess actual and consequential pro-environmental behavior in a way that appeals to various social scientific disciplines.

Beliefs and Social Norms as Precursors of Environmental Support: The Joint Influence of Collectivism and Socioeconomic Status.

The present research investigates how the cultural value of collectivism interacts with socioeconomic status (SES) to influence the basis of action. Using a U.S. national sample (N = 2,538), the research examines how these sociocultural factors jointly moderate the strength of two precursors of environmental support: beliefs about climate change and perceived descriptive norms. SES and collectivism interacted with climate change beliefs such that beliefs predicted environmental support (i.e., proenvironmental behaviors and policy support) more strongly for those who were high in SES and low in collectivism than for all other groups. This interaction was explained, in part, by sense of control. For descriptive norms, SES and collectivism did not interact but rather norms predicted action most strongly for those high in collectivism and high in SES. These findings demonstrate the theoretical and applied importance of examining multiple sociocultural characteristics together to understand the factors that drive action.

Uncertainty in the “New Normal”: Understanding the Role of Climate Change Beliefs and Risk Perceptions in Michigan Tree Fruit Growers’ Adaptation Behaviors

AbstractIn the midwestern United States, intensifying impacts from climate change necessitate adaptation by the agricultural sector. Tree fruit agriculture is uniquely vulnerable to climate change due to the long-lived nature of perennial systems, yet very few studies have addressed how fruit growers perceive climate change and are responding to climate risks. For this study, 16 semistructured interviews were conducted with Michigan tree fruit growers to understand how their climate change beliefs, beliefs about adaptive actions, and climate-related risk perceptions influence adaptation behaviors. While there was a great deal of uncertainty about the anthropogenic nature of climate change, growers generally agreed that unprecedented changes in climate and weather patterns were occurring. Because of a perception of little control over future climate impacts, most growers reactively adapted to climate risks that negatively impacted their orchards by implementing measures such as frost protection, irrigation, pesticides, and crop insurance. This study highlighted that while proactive adaptations such as crop diversification, planting new varieties, and improving soil health will be necessary to increase farm resilience in the future, growers were unable to justify making these changes due to their uncertainty about future climate changes. The findings from this study highlight the need for future outreach efforts by university extension agents, private agricultural advisors, and federal and state agency advisors to provide educational information on the long-term impacts of climate change in order to help growers increase the resilience of their farm in the face of future climate impacts.

Framing Messages on the Economic Impact of Climate Change Policies: Effects on Climate Believers and Climate Skeptics

ABSTRACT Citizens are increasingly polarized on climate change, making persuasive communication on the issue rarely effective. We investigated how individuals with different climate change beliefs evaluated gain- and loss-framed messages on the environmental and economic impact of a related policy. In Studies 1 & 2, we found that Italian (N = 240) and American (N = 172) participants evaluated the differently framed messages according to their initial climate change beliefs, except in the crucial case of loss-framed economic messages (i.e. stressing the financial burden of the policy), which were evaluated similarly by both climate believers and skeptics. Exposure to this frame also had a significant negative effect on support for the policy. In Study 3, the same effect was found with a nationally representative sample (N = 496) of Italian citizens. Discussion focuses on the benefits, and potential drawbacks, of communication regarding the economic consequences of climate change policies.

Who wants North Sea CCS, and why? Assessing differences in opinion between oil and gas industry respondents and wider energy and environmental stakeholders

Although Scotland and the wider UK is making good progress with research and development towards deployment of offshore carbon capture and storage, there is increasing divergence in opinion on the necessity of CCS for meeting climate change targets. Oil and gas operators appear optimistic about the technical feasibility of CCS; whereas civil society and NGOs are increasingly vocal in their scepticism towards the necessity of CCS in a net-zero society. Given that operators’ expertise may be required to support offshore CO2 storage given their subsea experience, and that civil society is important in shaping government and public opinion, this divergence may be a challenge to offshore CCS deployment in the UK and elsewhere. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the grounds on which oil and gas operators’ views on CCS differ from a wider range of stakeholders, through a survey and in-depth interviews. Our results show that people with more knowledge of CCS are more likely to support its deployment, and that strong belief in anthropogenic climate change is lower – albeit rising – among oil and gas respondents. Our results also show concern that the net-zero transition may have negative effects for carbon-intensive regions, and that storage expertise is the UK’s strongest skill set for CCS deployment. We suggest that across a range of stakeholders, the value of CCS is thus most likely to lie in specific applications (e.g. hydrogen) and/or very specific localities (e.g. places with existing subsurface knowledge and skills), rather than widespread deployment as a mitigation technology.

Country-level conditions like prosperity, democracy, and regulatory culture predict individual climate change belief

Decades after the scientific community agreed on the existence of human-made climate change, substantial parts of the world’s population remain unaware or unconvinced that human activity is responsible for climate change. Belief in human-made climate change continues to vary strongly within and across different countries. Here I analyse data collected by the Gallup World Poll between 2007 and 2010 on individual attitudes across 143 countries, using a random forest model, to show that country-level conditions like environmental protection, civil liberty, and economic development are highly predictive of individual climate change belief. Individual education and internet access, in contrast, are correlated to climate change awareness, but much less to belief in climate change’s anthropogenic causes. I also identify non-linear pattern in which country-level circumstances relate to individual climate change belief. The local importance of most predictors varies strongly across countries, indicating that each country has its relatively unique set of correlates of climate change belief.

Local Weather Effects: Perception of Climate Change and Public Support for Government Intervention

ObjectiveThis article examines how people's lived experience of local weather might influence climate policy preferences in the presence of strong partisan bias.MethodsUsing a comprehensive dataset combining four‐wave panel survey responses from U.S. residents over three years with geocoded data on their local weather experience, we evaluate the impacts of local weather variations on beliefs about climate change, risk perceptions of climate change, and climate policy preferences. The panel structure of our data allows us to causally identify how one's actual experience of weather modifies climate change opinions over time.ResultsWe find that both long‐ and short‐term unusual local weather experiences change individuals' climate change opinions and preferences on climate change policy.ConclusionOne's lived experience alters beliefs in climate change, risk perceptions of climate change, and preferences for government climate policy even in the context of strong partisan bias.

Why hate carbon taxes? Machine learning evidence on the roles of personal responsibility, trust, revenue recycling, and other factors across 23 European countries

Carbon taxes are considered a key instrument for achieving deep decarbonization but are often unpopular among voters. While existing studies indicate that public opposition to carbon taxes is influenced by climate change belief and by political trust, less is known about the relevance of other factors. Moreover, it remains unclear why people oppose carbon taxes more fiercely than other climate policies. To enhance understanding of carbon tax opposition, I synthesize and categorize 28 conditions that potentially provoke public opposition to carbon taxes, assess their independent importance for predicting carbon tax opposition, and review the specific form in which they predict carbon tax opposition. This analysis draws on data from approximately 44,400 individuals from 23 European countries. It uses a random forest model, a machine learning method, to estimate independent prediction effects. The results identify the feeling of personal responsibility for trying to reduce climate change as the most important condition for predicting opposition to carbon taxes and for predicting attitudes on other climate policies. Political trust, in contrast, strongly predicts carbon tax opposition but not attitudes on other climate policies, suggesting that low political trust could explain the peculiar public aversion against carbon taxes. Recycling revenues from existing carbon prices back to households, often considered crucial for securing public support, is only associated with minor increases in the acceptance of higher carbon taxes. Finally, the results reveal that age, market liberal values, and good governance are related to carbon tax opposition in a non-monotonous pattern.

What make people more likely to take personal action for climate mitigation? Taking the case of energy consumption in Europe

Studies tend to show the increasing awareness for climate change and the need to mitigate it. Last year, protests against taxes on fossil fuels suggested that people are not willing to bear the costs of such mitigation. However, people also protested globally, claiming their will to take action and potentially change lifestyles. Yet, energy consumption is one of the main drivers of climate change and can’t be addressed without citizen’s support. This paper will aim at studying the factors influencing people to limit their energy consumption, given their political, climate change and energy beliefs as well as their socio-demographical features. It can be used for policy making while trying to address lack of awareness and looking for targeted campaigns for instance. Using an ordinal logit model, fitted to data collected in 2016 on 44 387 individuals in 23 European countries, we show that feeling responsible for climate change and being worried about energy affordability are key predictors of energy reduction behaviours. Politics play a small part as well and should be studied more accurately on a country-level

Heat exposure and the climate change beliefs in a Desert City: The case of Phoenix metropolitan area

Beliefs in climate change are influenced by personal experiences and sociodemographic characteristics; yet justice considerations are often overlooked. We unveil the influence of these factors' on climate change beliefs in a large American city facing substantial climate change impacts, Phoenix, Arizona. Using the Phoenix Area Social Survey that includes data collected from (n = 806) households across fourteen cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, we investigate what factors influence a belief that “global warming and climate change are already occurring.” Engaging adaptive capacity and justice literatures with climate belief models, we find that belief in climate change and global warming is positively associated with race specifically other than non-Hispanic Whites, high levels of education, personal experience with heat-related illnesses, and liberal beliefs. Widespread agreement about climate change is found within the scientific community, but general populations, especially in the USA, lag behind in accepting climate change. Critically, there are important justice dimensions absent in the existing literature relevant to understanding belief in and the impacts of climate change. Unpacking these factors could help inform policy makers and civil society organizations in their efforts to design more “just adaptation” strategies.