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Opinion dynamics models are increasingly used to understand changes in opinions, behaviors, and policy in the context of climate change. We review recent research that demonstrates how these models enable the linkages between individual, social, institutional, and biophysical factors to explain when and how social change emerges over time and what its impact might be on emissions and the climate system. We focus on applications of opinion dynamics models to climate change and describe how factors interact in those models to create feedback loops that reinforce or dampen change. We demonstrate how these models reveal the dynamics of consensus or polarization in climate opinions, the evolution of sustainability technologies and policies, and when and how interventions or negotiations related to climate change are likely to succeed or fail. 

Despite the growing impacts of climate change worldwide, achieving consensus on climate action remains a challenge partly because of heterogeneity in perceptions of climate risks within and across countries. Lack of consensus has hindered global collective action. We use a system dynamics approach to examine how interactions among cultural, socio-political, psychological, and institutional factors shape public support or opposition for climate mitigation policy. We investigate the conditions under which the dominant public opinion about climate policy can shift within a 20-year time frame. We observed opinion shifts in 20% of simulations, primarily in individualistic cultural contexts with high perceived climate risk. Changing the dominant opinion was especially difficult to achieve in collectivistic cultures, as we observed no shifts in dominant opinion within the parameter ranges examined. Our study underscores the importance of understanding how cultural context mediates the approaches needed to effectively mobilize collective climate action. 

Abstract Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a climate intervention method that would reflect a portion of incoming solar radiation to cool the Earth and could be used to ameliorate the impacts of climate change, but that provokes strong reactions from experts and the public alike. Research has explored both the biophysical and human behavioral aspects of SRM but has not integrated these processes in a single framework. Our expectations for SRM development and deployment will be inaccurate until we integrate the feedbacks between human behavioral and cognitive processes and the biophysical and climate system. We propose a framework for describing these feedbacks and how they may mediate transitions in the development and operationalization of SRM as a climate intervention. We consider components such as public trust in SRM, moral hazard concerns, climate risk perceptions, and societal disruptions, and illustrate how the driving processes could change across the pre-development, post-development, and post-deployment phases of SRM operationalization to affect outcomes around SRM deployment and climate change. Our framework illustrates the importance of feedbacks between climate change, risk perceptions, and the human response and the necessity to integrate such feedbacks in the development of future scenarios for SRM. 

The socio-ecological systems (SESs) framework provides cross-disciplinary insight into complex environmental problems. Numerous studies have applied the SES framework to coastal and marine environments over the last two decades. We review and analyze 98 of those studies to (i) describe how SES concepts were examined and measured, (ii) describe how the studies included feedbacks and thresholds, and (iii) identify and analyze elements unique to coastal and marine SES frameworks. We find that progress has been made in understanding key SES properties in coastal and marine ecosystems, which include resilience, adaptive capacity, vulnerability, and governance. A variety of methods has been developed and applied to analyze these features qualitatively and quantitatively. We also find that recent studies have incorporated land-based stressors in their analyses of coastal issues related to nutrient runoff, bacterial pollution, and management of anadromous species to represent explicit links in land-to-sea continuums. However, the literature has yet to identify methods and data that can be used to provide causal evidence of non-linearities and thresholds within SES. In addition, our findings suggest that greater alignment and consistency are needed in models with regard to metrics and spatial boundaries between ecological and social systems to take full advantage of the SES framework and improve coastal and marine management.