- A new study by a team of international researchers—including one from Stellenbosch University entitle ‘Extreme weather event attribution predicts climate policy support across the world,’ found that most people are more likely to support climate policies if they see a connection between extreme weather and climate change.
- A few extreme weather events also seem to influence support for climate policies in different ways.
The researchers say that although extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, we know little about how experiencing these events—and attributing them to climate change—affects support for climate policies, particularly in the Global South.
For their study, the researchers assessed support for the following five climate policies: increasing taxes on carbon-intense foods, raising taxes on fossil fuels, expanding infrastructure for public transportation, increasing the use of sustainable energy, and protecting forested and land areas.
They used combined large-scale natural and social science data from 68 countries to develop a measure of how many people were exposed to extreme weather events—and to explore whether this exposure, along with people’s beliefs about whether climate change has impacted extreme weather events over the last decades, predict their support for climate policies. They also comparatively assessed the link between the size of exposed populations—defined as the average annual proportion of a country’s total population exposed to a specific weather-related hazard—to several extreme weather events and support for climate policies.
“Our data suggest that if individuals attribute extreme weather events to climate change, support for climate policies is higher regardless of whether the events are more frequent. The reverse causal relationship is also possible: people who are supportive of climate policies are more likely to attribute extreme weather to climate change.
“In line with previous research, increasing carbon taxes received the lowest support, with only 22% and 29% of people, respectively, indicating they very much supported increased taxes on carbon-intensive foods and fossil fuels. Protecting forested and land areas, by contrast, was a popular policy option, with 82% supporting it very much and only 3% not supporting it at all. The second-most supported policy was increasing the use of sustainable energy, with 75% supporting it very much, and only 5% not supporting it at all.
“We found strong differences in support across countries and policies. Support for climate policies was particularly high in African and Asian countries, average in Australia, Costa Rica, and the United Kingdom, and below the global average in several European countries, such as Czechia, Finland and Norway.
“Participants who identified as men, were younger, more religious, had higher education, higher income, left-leaning politics and who lived in urban areas were more likely to support climate policies.”
The researchers add that for some events, such as heatwaves and tropical cyclones, the effects of exposure on climate policy support were stronger for individuals who attribute extreme weather events to climate change more strongly.
“One possible explanation is that these types of extreme weather events allow for management strategies that can directly reduce the hazard itself, such as man-made flood protections, irrigation systems, prescribed burn-offs and land-use policies. Therefore, people may be more likely to support policies pertaining to law enforcement or economic regulations instead of climate change mitigation.”
The researchers do point out, however, that exposure to most types of extreme events did not predict people’s support for climate policies.
They also say that the extent to which people attribute extreme weather events to climate change varied across regions of the world.
“People in South America most strongly agreed that the occurrence of extreme weather events has been affected by climate change over the last decades, especially in Brazil and Colombia. This might be explained by the fact that belief in human-caused climate change and self-reported personal experience of extreme weather events are high in Latin America.
“People in Northern Europe and Africa, on the other hand, were less likely to attribute extreme weather events to climate change. In Africa, this could be explained by low levels of climate change awareness and belief in human-caused climate change across the continent.”
The researchers call for more studies about effective climate change communication on types of extreme weather events that are not typically associated with climate.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
