Encountering climate change: ‘seeing’ is more than ‘believing’

Abstract

Individuals' direct exposure to and experience of climate change are arguably integral aspects of their risk perceptions, understandings, and engagement with the issue. Recent research investigating these experiences has thrown into sharp relief some fundamental considerations with respect to public risk perceptions and responses, in particular the extent to which such perceived encounters might reflect a priori beliefs and motivated reasoning. Findings to date are intriguing and compelling, both in regard to the escalating percentages of individuals who report having such personal encounters, and conclusions being drawn with respect to the nature, significance, and influence of such direct experience. These findings have also led to some intuitively reasonable but possibly problematic recommendations regarding policy and issue and behavioural engagement implications. A focus on underlying processes of experience and belief, oversimplified in terms of 'seeing' or 'believing', has however deflected attention from other issues such as the nature and contexts of individual climate change encounters, the clarity of the constructs and validity of the measures being used for 'belief' and 'experience', and the transactional and phenomenological nature of climate change encounters. There is nonetheless current and convergent evidence that perceived direct experience of environmental changes or events deemed to be manifestations of climate change influences psychological responses such as risk perception, acceptance, belief certainty, distress, and psychological and behavioural adaptation. These findings suggest that such experiences, for many, foster a contextualized and more personally meaningful realisation of what climate change portends, implies, and ultimately means, locally and globally.

Psychological responses to the proximity of climate change

“…So far, this analysis is consistent with the rationale underlying the proximising approach: to increase action via higher levels of (emotional) concern 16,22,27,28 .While people may indeed change their behaviours when confronted with a threat, however, there are several reasons why they may respond to climate change in ways other than increased efforts to mitigate and adapt. For example, individuals may not always be clear about what they can do to effectively mitigate climate change 75,76 .…”

“…The relationships between exposure to extreme weather events and the way people feel about climate change and possible response strategies becomes more consistent when an additional factor is taken into account: namely, how individuals interpret such "climate signals" 27,39 . People who report having experienced changes or events in the natural environment that they think were caused by climate change are more likely to believe that climate change is relevant to their local area and themselves 42 than people who did not report such experience.…”

“…To illustrate, one study found that Britons who had recently experienced flooding (a weatherrelated phenomenon expected to occur more frequently in Britain because of climate change) perceived their local area to be more at risk from climate change, were more concerned about climate change impacts, had higher confidence in their ability to mitigate climate change, and were more willing to reduce their energy use in order to mitigate climate change than those who had not recently experienced flooding 26 . While some studies have revealed similar patterns 34-36 , other work suggests that experiencing the impacts of extreme weather events does not necessarily increase concern and the willingness to respond to climate change 37,38 .The relationships between exposure to extreme weather events and the way people feel about climate change and possible response strategies becomes more consistent when an additional factor is taken into account: namely, how individuals interpret such "climate signals" 27,39 . People who report having experienced changes or events in the natural environment that they think were caused by climate change are more likely to believe that climate change is relevant to their local area and themselves 42 than people who did not report such experience.…”

“…21 , where the term is used to describe a discursive strategy in which the speaker presents physically and temporally distant events as close and directly relevant to the addressee), the rationale behind proximising climate change seems to be that this approach (a) decreases the psychological distance between the issue and individuals who could or should act 17,22 and, (b) makes the consequences of climate change easier to visualise 4,23 and more personally relevant 24,25 . Moreover, proximising climate change is believed to increase (emotional) concern 16,22,26,27 and the feeling of being personally vulnerable 23,27 ; ultimately, these processes are expected to enhance people's motivation to act 3,4,[22][23][24]26,28 . The idea of focusing on proximal climate change to increase engagement with the issue is also consistent with a general tendency, known as temporal discounting, whereby people attach a lesser value to the same outcome if it is seen to be further away in time 29,30 .…”

“…Last but not least, people who felt that they had personally experienced climate change through weather-related events or changes were more likely to support mitigation 41,42 and adaptation 44 measures (for an overview, see ref. 27 ). These findings support the idea that bringing climate change psychologically closer can under certain circumstances have the expected motivational effects.…”