Forest Owners' Response to Climate Change: University Education Trumps Value Profile

Abstract

Do forest owners’ levels of education or value profiles explain their responses to climate change? The cultural cognition thesis (CCT) has cast serious doubt on the familiar and often criticized "knowledge deficit" model, which says that laypeople are less concerned about climate change because they lack scientific knowledge. Advocates of CCT maintain that citizens with the highest degrees of scientific literacy and numeracy are not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, this is the group in which cultural polarization is greatest, and thus individuals with more limited scientific literacy and numeracy are more concerned about climate change under certain circumstances than those with higher scientific literacy and numeracy. The CCT predicts that cultural and other values will trump the positive effects of education on some forest owners' attitudes to climate change. Here, using survey data collected in 2010 from 766 private forest owners in Sweden and Germany, we provide the first evidence that perceptions of climate change risk are uncorrelated with, or sometimes positively correlated with, education level and can be explained without reference to cultural or other values. We conclude that the recent claim that advanced scientific literacy and numeracy polarizes perceptions of climate change risk is unsupported by the forest owner data. In neither of the two countries was university education found to reduce the perception of risk from climate change. Indeed in most cases university education increased the perception of risk. Even more importantly, the effect of university education was not dependent on the individuals' value profile.

Effects of Policy Measures and Moderating Factors on Climate Change Adaptation Among Private Forest Owners in Sweden

“…Hengeveld et al 2014), whether the owner is motivated by production or ecological values may still lead to diverse effects on the forest. Contrary to Blennow et al (2016) who found only marginal support for the importance of value profiles for belief in the local effects of climate change among forest owners in Sweden (environmentalists displayed a stronger belief) and no such connection among owners in Germany, the present study suggests that the importance of forest values for responses to climate change cannot be ruled out. Nevertheless, an encouraging social context may be even more important than forest values for climate change adaptation.…”

Perceptions of climate change across the Canadian forest sector: The key factors of institutional and geographical environment

“…However, McCright and Dunlap [ 47 ] reported that the level of education in the United States is correlated with greater climate change risk perceptions only among liberals, but with a lower risk perception for conservatives, suggesting that higher education ultimately strengthens ideological views. This change in the sense of the interaction between education level and political view has not been observed for European forest owners [ 50 ], and we could not detect it in our dataset either, but attention should be paid to this possibility when designing awareness-raising campaigns.…”

Az éghajlatváltozás kérdése a magyar erdőgazdálkodók körében

“…Raftoyannis et al (2014) a mediterrán országokban vég-zett összehasonlító kutatásokat, vizsgálva a tűzbiztonsági intézkedések, a közvélemény figyelemfelkeltése és az üzemanyag használat szerepét az éghajlatváltozáshoz való adaptá-cióban. Blennow et al (2016) később arra hívta fel a figyelmet, hogy az erdészek között -a szakirodalomban a közvélekedéssel kapcsolatosan elterjedt összefüggéssel ellentétben -az egyetemi végzettség, a magasabb tudományos képzettség nem polarizálja az éghajlat-változásról való gondolkodást és a cselekvési hajlandóságot.…”