Climate Change as an Involuntary Exposure: A Comparative Risk Perception Study from Six Countries across the Global Development Gradient

Abstract

Climate change has been referred to as an involuntary exposure, meaning people do not voluntarily put themselves at risk for climate-related ill health or reduced standard of living. The purpose of this study is to examine people’s risk perceptions and related beliefs regarding (1) the likelihood of different risks occurring at different times and places and (2) collective (government) responsibility and personal efficacy in dealing with climate change, as well as (3) explore the ways in which climate risk may be amplified when posed against individual health and well-being. Previous research on this topic has largely focused on one community or one nation state, and so a unique characteristic of this study is the comparison between six different city (country) sites by their development and national wealth. Here, we collected 401 surveys from Phoenix (USA), Brisbane (Australia), Wellington (New Zealand), Shanghai (China), Viti Levu (Fiji), and Mexico City (Mexico). Results suggest that the hyperopia effect characterized the sample from each study site but was more pronounced in developed sites, suggesting that the more developed sites employ a broader perspective when approaching ways to mitigate their risk against climate-related health and well-being impacts.

Global Research Output and Theme Trends on Climate Change and Infectious Diseases: A Restrospective Bibliometric and Co-Word Biclustering Investigation of Papers Indexed in PubMed (1999–2018)

“…Zhang et al and Yang et al have proved the simplicity and effectiveness of the g-index in selecting highly-frequent words in their empirical studies [35,37]. The method for the determination of the number, g, is as follows: firstly, all major MeSH/subheading combination terms were sorted in descending order of frequency; i was the sequence number of each term; when i was equal to g, the cumulative frequency of the first g terms was not less than g 2 , while that of the first (g + 1) terms was less than (g + 1) 2 . Then, the first g terms were considered as high-frequency terms [37].…”

“…It has been firmly established that the Earth is warming, which is shown by the increase in the average ocean temperature and air temperature, and in the melting of snow and ice. Global climate change is one of the most widely discussed topics, not only in the field of climate science or policy making, but also in a range of health researches [ 1 , 2 ]. It can affect human health via different pathways of complexity, directness, and scale [ 3 , 4 , 5 ].…”