Personalized risk messaging can reduce climate concerns
Introduction
The climate crisis continues to intensify despite growing scientific certainty and capacity to forecast climate risks. Sea-level rise, which is the substantive focus of this paper, provides an illustrative example. The causal processes linking global climate change to sea-level rise are well accepted (IPCC, 2013, Warrick and Oerlemans, 1990, Church and White, 2006), and many coastal regions across the world are already experiencing increased flooding during high tides and storm events (Sweet, 2014). Concurrently, bio-physical models have been developed to provide spatiallyresolved predictions of coastal flooding from sea-level rise under different climate change and storm scenarios (Barnard et al., 2014, Smith et al., 2010). These models suggest that sea-level rise and associated flooding will result in severe economic, social, and environmental damages (Hinkel et al., 2014) and potentially displace millions of people (Hauer et al., 2016, Meehl et al., 2005, Strauss et al., 2015).
Despite current and predicted impacts, climate change risks such as sea-level rise are often not salient to the public. Instead, many individuals in the global North view climate change as an issue that threatens distant populations and future generations, not their own communities (Leiserowitz, 2006, Lorenzoni et al., 2007, O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009, Leviston et al., 2014). These citizen risk perceptions are important for issues like sea-level rise, where adaptation may require individual behavior change as well as support for adaptation policies (Lubell, 2017).
One potential strategy to increase the salience of climate risks is to make these risks more personally relevant for individuals (Rayner and Malone, 1997, Weber, 2006, Lorenzoni and Pidgeon, 2006, Lorenzoni et al., 2007, Spence et al., 2012, Scannell and Gifford, 2013). For instance, risk messaging that emphasizes local and concrete climate impacts (e.g., how changes in temperature, precipitation, extreme events, or sea levels will affect a specific individual or community) could potentially increase support for necessary climate risk mitigation. This potential is underscored by research showing how personal experiences with climate-related impacts can change household behaviors and increase support for climate adaptation (Spence et al., 2011).
Yet, despite the ubiquity of this idea in climate advocacy debates, empirical evaluations of “personalized” risk communication strategies have yielded mixed results (Shwom et al., 2008, Spence and Pidgeon, 2010, Spence et al., 2012, Scannell and Gifford, 2013, Brügger et al., 2015a, Brügger et al., 2016, Schoenefeld and McCauley, 2016). At the extreme, some recent research suggests such strategies can decrease individual risk concerns and undermine support for adaptation and mitigation policies (Spence and Pidgeon, 2010, Schoenefeld and McCauley, 2016). As a result, understanding whether personalized risk communications increase or decrease climate concerns is ultimately an empirical question with critical implications for policy-makers who are trying to change individual behavior and increase support for climate policy.
In this article, we analyze the impacts of personally-relevant risk messages on climate risk perceptions. More specifically, we report a large-n survey experiment on San Francisco Bay Area residents to investigate how providing local, spatially resolved sea-level rise information to individuals shapes their sea-level rise risk perceptions and their willingness to invest in climate adaptation measures. We capitalize on the fact that models of coastal hazards due to sea-level rise and storm surge are now precise enough to visualize expected flooding at a high level of spatial resolution (Barnard et al., 2009, Barnard et al., 2014). Thus, we are able to present citizens with specific information about potential sea-level rise in their communities (defined at the zip-code level).
Our results suggest that personalized risk messaging has uneven effects on public risk perceptions. We find that providing locally-resolved sea-level rise risk information to individuals on average reduces concern that sea-level rise will affect them personally, even in zip codes that are projected to see at least some flooding. However, this effect is less pronounced in zip codes with higher objective flooding risks. Further, overthe entire sample, the flood map communication creates a slight increase in belief that geographically-distant individuals will be harmed by sea-level rise. Finally, our experimental effects are only present among respondents who already believe that climate change is happening. This suggests that local sea-level rise information may have corrected inflated risk perceptions among individuals with pre-existing climate concerns. However, we do not find an effect of risk messaging on an individual's willingness to pay for regional climate adaptation measures. Overall, these findings suggest the need for researchers and policymakers to undertake new research on the potential psychological and risk perception mechanisms that contemporary climate risk communication strategies may entail.
Section snippets
Background
The past decade transformed climate change from an abstract future threat into an immediate source of harm to human and natural communities, including in the United States. From coastal flooding (Reed et al., 2015) to extreme weather (Hansen et al., 2012, Mann et al., 2017) to wildfires (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016), the signature of climate change can now be located in the lived experiences of individuals across both the global North and South. Yet, climate opinion surveys and focus groups
Methods
We contracted with Qualtrics to survey households in the San Francisco Bay Area between June 5 and July 27, 2017, generating 2201 complete survey responses. We follow standard definitions of the San Francisco Bay Area to include residents of nine counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma) that border the Bay. Qualtrics survey response rates vary from 8-12%.
To ensure spatial coverage across all Bay Area counties, Qualtrics delivered
Results
Fig. 2 reports descriptive results of our sample's sea-level rise risk perceptions. This figure limits analysis to control group respondents (who never received any zip-level flood risk information). Among these control individuals, we find that individual respondents view themselves, personally, as least at risk from sea-level rise; they report the highest levels of perceived harm when considering future generations and developing countries. In other words, Bay Area publics still view
Discussion
Our results provide a rigorous empirical evaluation of how personalized risk messages may influence perceptions of sea-level rise risk. In line with previous research, we find that sea-level rise is not viewed as an immediate threat for many Bay Area residents; the majority believe it will not harm them personally and that the most significant harm will be experienced by future generations and developing countries. At the same time, our results suggest that providing individuals with
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Thanks to Jennifer Marlon and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This study was completed with funding from the National Science Foundation. (Award Abstract #1541056, CRISP Type 2: Collaborative: Multi-scale Infrastructure Interactions with Intermittent Disruptions: Coastal Flood Protection, Transportation and Governance Networks.).