Does risk communication really decrease cooperation in climate change mitigation?

Abstract

Effective communication of risks involved in the climate change discussion is crucial and despite ambitious protection policies, the possibility of irreversible consequences actually occurring can only be diminished but never ruled out completely. We present a laboratory experiment that studies how residual risk of failure of climate change policies affects willingness to contribute to such policies. Despite prevailing views on people's risk aversion, we found that contributions were higher at least in the final part of treatments including a residual risk. We interpret this as the product of a psychological process where residual risk puts participants into an "alarm mode," keeping their contributions high. We discuss the broad practical implications this might have on the real-world communication of climate change.

Investing into climate change mitigation despite the risk of failure

“…If after 10 rounds the total group contribution was lower than a predefined (and known) threshold, the group faced the (a priori) risk of a large monetary loss, emulating the consequences of climate change. The surprising, albeit preliminary result of their study was that, everything else being equal, the participants generally invested more and reached the threshold more frequently when a low but positive level of residual risk was present in the game (Farjam et al 2018).…”

“…All participants received on-screen instructions identical to those in Farjam et al (2018), which included a brief explanation of the problem of global warming and use of the funds contributed to the climate account to purchase carbon compensation credits. As a means of control and also to decrease the probability of software bots being used, the participants had to answer at least 3 out of 7 comprehension questions correctly to play the game.…”

“…On the other hand, a scenario with residual risk compared with one without does not allow for such optimism, which makes it rational to perceive the former as more threatening. In line with this logic, Farjam et al (2018) showed that residual risk in the context of climate change mitigation activities could actually increase contributions in a collective-risk social dilemma (CRSD) game (Milinski et al 2008) where the participants had the choice either to keep their endowment for themselves or to contribute part of it to a common "climate account." If after 10 rounds the total group contribution was lower than a predefined (and known) threshold, the group faced the (a priori) risk of a large monetary loss, emulating the consequences of climate change.…”

“…This also enabled us to investigate if the relationship between the level of residual risk and individual contributions to the climate account is actually linear. Taking into account both the findings in Farjam et al (2018) and the relation between the various levels of a priori and residual risk, we expected an inverted U-shaped relationship between the level of residual risk and contributions, i.e., the highest level of contributions would be attained at intermediate levels of residual risk. If residual risk was negligible, the participants would essentially be in a situation where only a priori risk mattered whereas if residual risk was too high, the improvement over the a priori risk scenario would become insufficient to motivate the contributions.…”

“…However, those works only considered the risk linked to the failure of preventing further climate change, without considering that humanity would suffer certain consequences of climate change even in the best-case scenario of the international collaboration succeeding in limiting global warming to around 1.5 • C (IPCC 2018). Farjam et al (2018) distinguished between an a priori and a residual risk, the former referring to the consequences of an unsuccessful collective action (e.g., not limiting the increase of the temperature to 1.5-2 • C above pre-industrial levels, as stated by the 2009 Paris Agreement), the latter referring to the risk that cannot be ruled out even in case of a successful collective action (e.g., due to the climate inertia). It is also important to note that the residual risk discussed here is different from what is sometimes referred to as threshold ambiguity, i.e., what level of greenhouse gases concentration is going to trigger positive feedback loops leading to a self-sustaining climate change (Holden et al 2018;Stocker 2013).…”