A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact eprints@nottingham.ac.uk 1 Author Posting. © The Authors 2012. This is the author's version of the work. For full bibliographic citation, please refer to Risk Analysis,32,6,[957][958][959][960][961][962][963][964][965][966][967][968][969][970][971][972]

If uncontrolled, human influences on the climate system may generate changes that will endanger various aspects of life on Earth. The precise implications of the scientific claims about climate change, and the extent to which they pose dangers to various populations, are becoming intensely debated at many levels in relation to policy. How 'danger' is interpreted will ultimately affect which actions are taken. In this paper, we examine how climate change is conceptualised by publics in Europe and in the USA. Although there is widespread concern about climate change, it is of secondary importance in comparison to other issues in people's daily lives. Most individuals relate to climate change through personal experience, knowledge, the balance of benefits and costs, and trust in other societal actors. We analyse these factors through findings from various surveys and studies, which highlight both the distinctiveness and some shared perspectives at a generalised level. We reflect upon these in relation to trust and responsibility for climate change action, and risk communication, supporting the call for discourses about climate change to also be situated in people's locality, as a means of increasing its saliency.

A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. One of the reasons that people may not take action to mitigate climate change is that they lack first-hand experience of its potential consequences. From this perspective, individuals who have direct experience of phenomena that may be linked to climate change would be more likely to be concerned by the issue and thus more inclined to undertake sustainable behaviours. So far, the evidence available to test this hypothesis is limited, and in part contradictory 1-4 . Here we use national survey data collected from 1,822 individuals across the UK in 2010, to examine the links between direct flooding experience, perceptions of climate change and preparedness to reduce energy use. We show that those who report experience of flooding express more concern over climate change, see it as less uncertain and feel more confident that their actions will have an effect on climate change. Importantly, these perceptual differences also translate into a greater willingness to save energy to mitigate climate change. Highlighting links between local weather events and climate change is therefore likely to be a useful strategy for increasing concern and action.

This study presents a detailed investigation of public scepticism about anthropogenic climate change in Britain using the trend, attribution, and impact scepticism framework of Rahmstorf (2004). The study found that climate scepticism is currently not widespread in Britain. Although uncertainty and scepticism about the potential impacts of climate change were fairly common, both trend and attribution scepticism were far less prevalent. It further showed that the different types of scepticism are strongly interrelated. Although this may suggest that the general public does not clearly distinguish between the different aspects of the climate debate, there is a clear gradation in prevalence along the Rahmstorf typology.

Communications regarding climate change are increasingly being utilised in order to encourage sustainable behaviour and the way that these are framed can significantly alter the impact that they have on the recipient. This experimental study seeks to investigate how transferable existing research findings on framing from Participants then completed measures of various relevant socio-cognitive factors and questions assessing their responses to the information that they had received. Results indicated that, ceteris paribus, gain frames were superior to loss frames in increasing positive attitudes towards climate change mitigation, and also increased the perceived severity of climate change impacts. However, third variable analyses demonstrated that the superiority of the gain frame was partially suppressed by lower fear responses and poorer information recall within gain framed information. In addition, framing climate change impacts as distant (whilst keeping information presented the same) resulted in climate change impacts being perceived as more severe, while attitudes towards climate change mitigation were more positive when participants were asked to consider social rather than personal aspects of climate change. Implications for designing communications about climate change are outlined.

This article investigates possible differential levels of trust in government regulation across five different risk contexts and the relationship between a number of concepts that might be thought of as comprising distinctive "dimensions" of trust. It appeared that how people perceive government and its policies toward risk regulation was surprisingly similar for each of the five risk cases. A principal-component analysis showed that the various trust items could best be described by two dimensions: a general trust dimension, which was concerned with a wide range of trust-relevant aspects, such as competence, care, fairness, and openness, and a scepticism component that reflects a sceptical view regarding how risk policies are brought about and enacted. Again, the results were surprisingly similar across the five risk cases, as the same solution was found in each of the different samples. It was also examined whether value similarity has an additional value in predicting trust in risk regulation, compared to the more conventional aspects of trust. Based on the two independent trust factors that were found in this study, a typology of trust is proposed that ranges from full trust to a deep type of distrust. It is argued that for a functioning society it could well be more suitable to have critical but involved citizens in many situations.

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A long history of interdisciplinary research highlights the powerful role that human values play in shaping individuals' engagement with environmental issues. That certain values are supportive of proenvironmental orientation and behavior is now well established. But as the challenge of communicating the risks of climate change has grown increasingly urgent, there has been a rise in interest around how values shape public engagement with this issue. In the current paper, we review the growing body of work that explores the role of human values (and the closely related concept of cultural worldviews) in public engagement with climate change. Following a brief conceptual overview of values and their relationship to environmental engagement in general, we then provide a review of the literature linking value-orientations and engagement with climate change. We also review both academic and 'gray' literature from civil society organizations that has focused on how public messages about climate change should be framed, and discuss the significance of research on human values for climate change communication strategies.