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California must adapt to increasing wildfire activity concurrent with climate change and expanding housing development in fire-prone areas. Recent decades have seen record-breaking fire activity, economic costs, and human health impacts. Residents more frequently face home evacuations, prolonged periods of unhealthy air quality, and power shut-offs. Understanding how these experiences influence support for risk mitigation policies is essential to inform action on climate and fire adaptation. To better understand linkages between experience and policy support, we surveyed California residents (n= 645) about their wildfire-related experiences, risk perceptions, and support for 18 wildfire risk mitigation policies. To assess how the relationship between policy support and wildfire experience is modulated by preexisting worldviews, we measured the extent to which respondents are motivated by individualistic or communitarian values as proposed in the cultural theory of risk. We surveyed residents across a gradient of wildfire impacts, spatially stratifying residences based on wildland-urban-interface type and proximity to large 2020 wildfires. Support was generally high for most policies, though most respondents opposed incorporating future risk into insurance rates and coverage. Policy support models showed that communitarian worldviews were more consistently associated with greater support for diverse wildfire mitigation policies than were measures of recent experience with wildfire. These results suggest that California residents within our sample regions already support many wildfire risk mitigation strategies, and preexisting societal beliefs are a stronger predictor of these views than personal experiences with wildfire. Policy-makers can utilize this understanding to focus on crafting policies and messaging that resonates with individualistic values.

 

Political conflicts about energy and climate change policies often have local implications, yet little is known about local public opinion towards these policies. Here, we estimate support towards 26 climate change mitigation policies for 402 German counties and for up to four points of time using multilevel regression and poststratification. We find that local support for climate policies varies by up to 60 percentage points across German counties with large disparities between the rural and urban population. While support for the expansion of wind power plants and solar power plants have converged over the last years, attitudes on the phase-out of coal power have polarized across regions. Using a spatial panel analysis, we find that support for the expansion of wind and solar plants correlate with the actual development of solar and wind capacities in these regions. Moreover, the spread of climate policy opinion is strongly determined by spatial diffusion as change in one region positively influences the trajectory of policy opinion among its neighbors.

 

Abstract Extreme heat events are one of the deadliest weather-related hazards in the United States and are increasing in frequency and severity as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Further, some subpopulations may be more vulnerable than others because of social, economic, and political factors that create disparities in hazard impacts and responses. Vulnerability is also affected by risk perceptions, which can influence protective behaviors. In this study, we use national survey data to investigate the association of key sociodemographic factors with public risk perceptions of heatwaves. We find that risk perceptions are most associated with income, race/ethnicity, gender, and disability status. Age, an important predictor of heat mortality, had smaller associations with heat risk perceptions. Low-income, nonwhite, and disabled individuals tend to perceive themselves to be at greater risks from heatwaves than other subpopulations, corresponding to their elevated risk. Men have lower risk perceptions than women despite their higher mortality and morbidity from heat. This study helps to identify subpopulations in the United States who see themselves as at risk from extreme heat and can inform heat risk communication and other risk reduction practices. 

Abstract Public attitudes toward climate change influence climate and energy policies and guide individual mitigation and adaptation behaviors. Over the last decade, as scientific certainty about the causes and impacts of, and solutions to the climate crisis has increased, cities, states, and regions in the United States have pursued diverse policy strategies. Yet, our understanding of how Americans’ climate views are changing remains largely limited to national trends. Here we use a large US survey dataset ( N = 27 075 ) to estimate dynamic, state-level changes in 16 climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy preferences over 13 years (2008–2020). We find increases in global warming issue importance and perceived harm in every state. Policy support, however, increased in more liberal states like California and New York, but remained stable elsewhere. Year-by-year estimates of state-level climate opinions can be used to support sub-national mitigation and adaptation efforts that depend on public support and engagement. 

Abstract Message diffusion and message persuasion are two important aspects of success for official risk messages about hazards. Message diffusion enables more people to receive lifesaving messages, and message persuasion motivates them to take protective actions. This study helps to identify win-win message strategies by investigating how an under-examined factor, message content that is theoretically important to message persuasion, influences message diffusion for official risk messages about heat hazards on Twitter. Using multilevel negative binomial regression models, the respective and cumulative effects of four persuasive message factors, hazard intensity, health risk susceptibility, health impact , and response instruction on retweet counts were analyzed using a dataset of heat-related tweets issued by U.S. National Weather Service accounts. Two subsets of heat-related tweets were also analyzed: 1) heat warning tweets about current or anticipated extreme heat events and 2) tweets about non-extreme heat events. This study found that heat-related tweets that mentioned more types of persuasive message factors were retweeted more frequently, and so were two subtypes of heat-related tweets. Mentions of hazard intensity also consistently predicted increased retweet counts. Mentions of health impacts positively influenced message diffusion for heat-related tweets and tweets about non-extreme heat events. Mentions of health risk susceptibility and response instructions positively predicted retweet counts for tweets about non-extreme heat events and tweets about official extreme heat warnings respectively. In the context of natural hazards, this research informs practitioners with evidence-based message strategies to increase message diffusion on social media. Such strategies also have the potential to improve message persuasion.