Climate visuals: A mixed methods investigation of public perceptions of climate images in three countries

Imagery plays a central role in climate change communication. But whereas research on the verbal communication of climate change has proliferated, far fewer studies have focused on visual communication. Correspondingly, relatively little is known about how to effectively engage the public using the visual medium. The current research is the first mixed methods, cross-national investigation of public perceptions of climate images, with a focus on photographic climate change imagery. Four structured discussion groups in the UK and Germany (N = 32) and an international survey with an embedded experiment in the UK, Germany and the US (N = 3014) were conducted to examine how different types of climate change imagery were evaluated. The qualitative research pointed to the importance of the perceived authenticity and credibility of the human subjects in climate images, as well as widespread negativity towards images depicting protests and demonstrations. Images of climate ‘solutions’ produced positive emotional responses in the survey and were less polarizing for climate change skeptics, but they were also the least motivating of action. Familiar climate images (such as a polar bear on melting ice) were easily understood in the survey (and evaluated positively as a consequence) but viewed with cynicism in discussion groups. We present a detailed discussion of these and other key findings in this paper and describe a novel application of the data through an online image library for practitioners which accompanies the research (www.climatevisuals.org).     

Adaptation to climate change in Uganda: Evidence from micro level data

This study employed data from the 2005/06 Uganda national household survey to identify adaptation strategies and factors governing their choice in Uganda's agricultural production. Factors that mediate or hinder adaptation across different shocks and strategies include age of the household head, access to credit and extension facilities and security of land tenure. There are also differences in choice of adaptation strategies by agro-climatic zone. The appropriate policy level responses should complement the autonomous adaptation strategies by facilitating technology adoption and availing information to farmers not only with regard to climate related forecasts but available weather and pest resistant varieties.     

Ethics and public perception of climate change: Exploring the Christian voices in the US public debate

Climate change raises many questions with strong moral and ethical dimensions that are important to address in climate-policy formation and international negotiations. Particularly in the United States, the public discussion of these dimensions is strongly influenced by religious groups and leaders. Over the past few years, many religious groups have taken positions on climate change, highlighting its ethical dimensions. This paper aims to explore these ethical dimensions in the US public debate in relation to public support for climate policies. It analyzes in particular the Christian voices in the US public debate on climate change by typifying the various discourses. Three narratives emerge from this analysis: ‘conservational stewardship’ (conserving the ‘garden of God’ as it was created), ‘developmental stewardship’ (turning the wilderness into a garden as it should become) and ‘developmental preservation’ (God's creation is good and changing; progress and preservation should be combined). The different narratives address fundamental ethical questions, dealing with stewardship and social justice, and they provide proxies for public perception of climate change in the US. Policy strategies that pay careful attention to the effects of climate change and climate policy on the poor – in developing nations and the US itself – may find support among the US population. Religious framings of climate change resonate with the electorates of both progressive and conservative politicians and could serve as bridging devices for bipartisan climate-policy initiatives.     

Human health as a motivator for climate change mitigation: results from four European high-income countries

Invoking health benefits to promote climate-friendly household behavior has three unique advantages: (i) health co-benefits accrue directly to the acting individual, they are "private goods" rather than public ones; (ii) the evidence base for, and magnitude of health co-benefits is well-established; and (iii) the idea of a healthy life-style is well-engrained in public discourse, much more so than that of a climate-friendly life-style. In previous research, assessing the influence of information on health effects on people’s motivation to adopt mitigation actions, health co-benefits for the individual were typically confounded with collective health co-benefits, for example from pollution reduction. The present research aims to overcome this limitation by providing information on individual health co-benefits that are unconditional on the actions of others (direct health co-benefits). We report effects of this kind of health information on stated willingness to adopt mitigation actions as well as on simulation-based carbon emission reductions in a pre-registered experimental setting among 308 households in 4 mid-size case-study cities in 4 European high-income countries: France, Germany, Norway and Sweden. For each mitigation action from the sectors food, housing, and mobility, half of the sample received the amount of CO₂equivalents (CO₂-eq) saved and the financial costs or savings the respective action generated. The other half additionally received information on direct health co-benefits, where applicable. For households receiving information on direct health co-benefits, we find a higher mean willingness to adopt food and housing actions, and a greater proportion very willing to adopt one or more mitigation actions (OR 1.86, 95% CI 1.1, 3.12); and a greater simulated reduction in overall carbon footprint: difference in percent reduction -2.70%, (95% CI -5.34, -0.04) overall and -4.45%, (95% CI -8.26, -0.64) for food. Our study is the first to show that providing information on strictly unconditional, individual health co-benefits can motivate households in high-income countries to adopt mitigation actions.     

Media attention for climate change around the world: A comparative analysis of newspaper coverage in 27 countries

Climate change is a global phenomenon, and its outcomes affect societies around the world. So far, however, studies on media representations of climate change have mostly concentrated on Western societies. This paper goes beyond this limited geographical scope by presenting a comparative analysis of issue attention in 27 countries. The sample includes, among others, countries that have committed themselves to greenhouse gas emission reductions under the Kyoto Protocol such as Germany as well as countries that are strongly affected by the consequences of climate change like India. In a first step, it describes the development of media attention for climate change in these countries from 1996 to 2010. Second, it compares the amount of media attention and explores whether it corresponds with indicators measuring the relevance of climate change and climate policies for a country. The analyses show that climate change coverage has increased in all countries. Still, overall media attention levels, as well as the extent of growth over time, differ strongly between countries. Media attention is especially high in carbon dependent countries with commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.     

Interface bureaucrats and the everyday remaking of climate interventions: Evidence from climate change adaptation in Zambia

When climate change policies are implemented in practice, they travel through the hands of a range of practitioners who not only mediate but also potentially transform climate interventions. This article highlights the role of a group of actors whose practices have so far received little attention in the study of climate change governance, namely the public servants who are responsible for the everyday implementation of national climate change policies and associated programmes on the ground. Situated at the frontline of the state and often engaging directly with citizens, these “interface bureaucrats” occupy a complex position in which they must balance their role as representatives of the state with the need to accommodate the pressures, interests and practical challenges associated with everyday policy implementation. In this article we examine how interface bureaucrats in Zambia seek to navigate this role as they go about implementing national climate change adaptation policies in practice, and what this means for the nature and outcome of these interventions. We identify key dilemmas of the interface bureaucrats in our study areas, namely (i) intervening with limited reach, (ii) implementing generic policies, and (iii) managing conflicting interests. We show how they address these dilemmas through highly pragmatic practices involving informal agreements with community members, discretionary adjustments of official policies, and negotiation of contested interventions. As a result, the nature and outcomes of climate change adaptation interventions end up differently from the official policies and the underlying governance interests of the central state. Our findings suggest a need for greater attention to the role of interface bureaucrats as everyday climate policy makers and point to the significance of pragmatism and compromise in the interaction between state actors and citizens in environmental interventions.     

Challenges in financing public sector low-carbon initiatives: lessons from private finance for a school district in British Columbia,Canada

Governments are major investors in climate change mitigation, but aversion to public indebtedness has led to reliance on private finance to deliver public assets. Compounding this challenge, financing through Energy Service Contracts is ruled out by accounting rules. With public and traditional private funding avenues closed, government departments have sought contracts that do not disclose the full cost of borrowing, such as the Public–Private Partnership (PPP) described in this case study. We unpack the utility contract filed with the provincial regulator to show that circumventing budgetary constraints cost the Delta School Board (DSB) 8.75% per annum on borrowed private funds while public finance would have cost 4%pa. All levels of the public sector are keen to play their role in climate mitigation. Climate policy is about not passing our burden of unbridled fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions to future generations. If we do not exempt public sector capital investments for decarbonization from deficit regulations, we risk passing an unnecessary economic burden to future generations.

Key policy insights

• Transition to a low-carbon economy requires public sector investments that exceed budget deficit regulations and political aversion in many jurisdictions;

• Private–Public Partnerships are currently viewed as the solution to this self-imposed fiscal constraint;

• PPPs without clear performance targets or contractual templates will expose less experienced public sector investors to high costs and emissions above expectations.

     

The interfaces of public and private adaptation: Lessons from flooding in the Deerfield River Watershed

Successful adaptation to climate risks will depend on the outcomes of many coordinated and uncoordinated actions. Key will be ensuring public and private adaptations undertaken at a variety of scales do not undermine one another. To improve understandings of how adaptive responses accumulate, we investigate interactions between public and private efforts to mitigate flood hazards in the Deerfield River Watershed, located in Western Massachusetts, USA. Through interviews, we uncover the manner in which private adaptations, undertaken by landowners seeking to protect their land from flood impacts, are both determined in response to and have an effect on public adaptations seeking to address flood impacts across the watershed. Landowners respond to public adaptations based on their perceptions of the appropriateness of adaptive pathways including how they view the effectiveness of adaptive action and how the actions fit with the social contract. As a result, the interface between public and private adaptations takes various forms: commutable, attenuating, synergistic, or countervailing. Our findings underscore how, in areas with high geo-physical connectivity and where responsibility is dispersed across private and public entities, anticipating and responding to multiple interfaces between public and private adaptations is needed for public adaptations to achieve the best cumulative outcomes.     

Emerging meta-organisations and adaptation to global climate change: Evidence from implementing adaptation in Nepal,Pakistan and Ghana

As developing countries move from policy to implementing adaptation to climate change, formal operational structures are emerging that exceed the expertise of any one actor. We refer to these arrangements as ‘meta-organisations’ that comprise many autonomous component organisations tackling adaptation. The meta-organisations set standards, define purposes, and specify appropriate means-ends criteria for delivering adaptation. Using empirical data from the three cases, Nepal, Pakistan and Ghana, the study identifies and analyses six attributes of the meta and component organisational structures. We argue that organisational structures are crucial to understanding adaptation, specifying policy and implementation. Our analysis demonstrates that while each country promotes similar objectives, the emerging structures are quite distinct, shaped by country-specific attributes and issues that lead to different outcomes. Nepal’s priority for a formal process has come at the cost of delayed implementation. Pakistan’s devolved approach lacks legitimacy to scale up the process nationally. Ghana’s use of existing decentralised structures and budgets relegates adaptation below other development priorities. These divergent structures arise from the different needs for legitimacy and accountability, and the relative priority attached to adaptation against other needs.     

The impact of compensatory measures on public support for carbon taxation: an experimental study in Sweden

This study aims at better understanding how, and to what extent, perceptions of a policy instrument’s distributional effects impact on policy support, focusing on the case of CO₂ taxes on petrol in Sweden. Through a large-scale (N?=?5000) randomized survey experiment with a 2?×?3 factorial design, the extent to which perceptions of fairness determine attitudes to a suggested increase of the Swedish CO₂ tax is explored. Furthermore, the study considers whether these effects change with the level of the suggested tax increase, as well as whether negative sentiments can be alleviated by combining it with a compensatory measure in the shape of a simultaneous income tax cut financed by the revenues from the tax increase. The results show that a higher tax increase is both viewed as more unfair and enjoys weaker support. Furthermore, compensatory measures can be a powerful policy design tool to increase perceptions of the policy as fair, but the effect of compensation on policy support is conditioned by the individual’s left–right ideological position. Whereas people self-identifying to the right react favourably to compensatory measures, people self-identifying to the left become less supportive of a tax increase when combined with a simultaneous cut in income taxes.

Key policy insights

• Perceptions of fairness are highly important for explaining public support for climate policy tools, specifically CO₂ taxes.

• Compensatory measures can be a powerful policy design tool to increase perceptions of the policy as less unfair.

• However, the effect of compensatory measures on policy support is conditioned by ideological position, and only successful among people to the ideological right.

• In contexts dominated by right-wing ideals, a combination of a tax and a compensatory scheme may be a successful route forward towards increased climate policy support.

• In left-oriented contexts the results imply that a CO₂ tax without compensation seems more likely to increase support.

     

The climate change mitigation impacts of active travel: Evidence from a longitudinal panel study in seven European cities

Active travel (walking or cycling for transport) is considered the most sustainable and low carbon form of getting from A to B. Yet the net effects of changes in active travel on changes in mobility-related CO₂ emissions are complex and under-researched. Here we collected longitudinal data on daily travel behavior, journey purpose, as well as personal and geospatial characteristics in seven European cities and derived mobility-related lifecycle CO₂ emissions over time and space. Statistical modelling of longitudinal panel (n = 1849) data was performed to assess how changes in active travel, the ‘main mode’ of daily travel, and cycling frequency influenced changes in mobility-related lifecycle CO₂ emissions.We found that changes in active travel have significant lifecycle carbon emissions benefits, even in European urban contexts with already high walking and cycling shares. An increase in cycling or walking consistently and independently decreased mobility-related lifecycle CO₂ emissions, suggesting that active travel substituted for motorized travel – i.e. the increase was not just additional (induced) travel over and above motorized travel. To illustrate this, an average person cycling 1 trip/day more and driving 1 trip/day less for 200 days a year would decrease mobility-related lifecycle CO₂ emissions by about 0.5 tonnes over a year, representing a substantial share of average per capita CO₂ emissions from transport. The largest benefits from shifts from car to active travel were for business purposes, followed by social and recreational trips, and commuting to work or place of education. Changes to commuting emissions were more pronounced for those who were younger, lived closer to work and further to a public transport station.Even if not all car trips could be substituted by active travel the potential for decreasing emissions is considerable and significant. The study gives policy and practice the empirical evidence needed to assess climate change mitigation impacts of urban transport measures and interventions aimed at mode shift to more sustainable modes of transport. Investing in and promoting active travel whilst ‘demoting’ private car ownership and use should be a cornerstone of strategies to meet ‘net zero’ carbon targets, particularly in urban areas, while also reducing inequalities and improving public health and quality of urban life in a post-COVID-19 world.     

Citizen preferences on private-public co-regulation in environmental governance: Evidence from Switzerland

Environmental policy is touching on ever more aspects of corporate and individual behavior, and there is much debate over what combinations of top-down (government-imposed) and bottom-up (voluntary private sector) measures to use. In democratic societies, citizens’ preferences over such combinations are crucial because they shape the political mandates based on which policymakers act. We argue that policy designs that involve private-public co-regulation receive more citizen support if they are based on inclusive decision-making, use strong transparency and monitoring mechanisms, and include a trigger for government intervention in case of ineffectiveness. Survey experiments in Switzerland (N = 1941) provide strong support for these arguments. Our research demonstrates that differences in co-regulation design have major implications for public support. Another key finding is that there seems to be a contradiction between inclusiveness and democratic accountability for policy outcomes. The findings are surprisingly consistent across two very different green economy issues we focus on empirically (decarbonization of finance, pesticides). This suggests that our study design offers a useful template for research that explores public opinion on green economy policy designs for other issues and in other countries.     

Urban greenspace as a climate change adaptation strategy for subtropical Asian cities: A comparative study across cities in three countries

Interest in nature-based approaches for climate change adaptation in cities is growing. Whilst there is a growing field of scholarship in a European and North America setting, research on the policy and governance of urban greenspace for climate adaptation in subtropical Asia is limited. Given the different development patterns, environmental characteristics and governance arrangements in subtropical cities, plus their comparatively large population and high climate risk, this is a significant knowledge gap. In response, this paper evaluates competences – skill sets, capabilities, and supporting policy and legislation – to enact adaptation through greenspace across different governance contexts; and assesses how international rhetoric on nature-based adaptation becomes localised to subtropical Asian city settings. We conduct interviews with stakeholders, plus review of relevant policy and city-specific research, for three cities with different governance and development contexts: Hanoi (Vietnam); Taipei (Taiwan); and Fukuoka (Japan). Across all three cases, we find that institutional structures and processes for connecting different remits and knowledge systems are a bigger challenge than a lack of appropriate policy or individuals with the required technical knowledge. However, opportunities for civil society participation and consideration of justice issues vary between the cities according to the socio-political context. These findings illustrate the value of individuals and organisations able to work across institutional boundaries in linking greenspace and adaptation agendas for subtropical Asian cities; and the importance of competence in collaboration with developers and civil society so that the rapid development or regeneration seen in subtropical Asian contexts does not tend towards green climate gentrification. More broadly, our findings show that the diverse nature of subtropical Asian cities means the role of greenspace in climate adaptation is likely to be context-specific, and thus that caution must be exercised against uncritically importing best practices from exemplar cases elsewhere.