Do Flood and Heatwave Experiences Shape Climate Opinion? Causal Evidence from Flooding and Heatwaves in England and Wales
Do Flood and Heatwave Experiences Shape Climate Opinion? Causal Evidence from Flooding and Heatwaves in England and Wales
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DOI：
10.1007/s10640-023-00796-0
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发表时间：
2023-08
影响因子：
5.9
通讯作者：
Paul M. Lohmann;A. Kontoleon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Paul M. Lohmann;A. Kontoleon
了解极端天气事件的个人经历如何提高对气候变化的认识和关注具有重要的政策意义。人们一再认为，通过极端天气事件接近气候变化是一种有希望的战略，可以增加对这一问题的参与，并鼓励气候变化行动。在本文中，我们利用地理参考面板数据的气候变化的态度，以及自然变化的洪水和热浪暴露在英格兰和威尔士估计的因果关系的极端天气事件对气候变化的态度和环境行为的差异，在差异匹配的方法。我们的研究结果表明，洪水和热浪的个人经历显着增加了对气候变化影响的风险感知，但平均而言，对气候变化问题或环保行为没有影响。此外，研究结果表明，洪水对风险感知的影响是高度局部化的，并在更远的距离上减少。对于热浪，我们发现对风险感知的影响是由2018年和2019年最近突出的夏季热浪驱动的。经历了这两次事件，除了风险认知外，还大大增加了对气候变化的关注和环保行为。
Understanding how personal experience of extreme weather events raises awareness and concern about climate change has important policy implications. It has repeatedly been argued that proximising climate change through extreme weather events holds a promising strategy to increase engagement with the issue and encourage climate change action. In this paper, we exploit geo-referenced panel data on climate change attitudes as well as natural variation in flood and heatwave exposure in England and Wales to estimate the causal effect of extreme weather events on climate change attitudes and environmental behaviours using a difference-in-differences matching approach. Our findings suggest that personal experience with both flooding and heatwaves significantly increases risk perception towards climate change impacts but has no effect on climate change concern or pro-environmental behaviour, on average. Moreover, the findings indicate that the effect of flooding on risk perception is highly localised and diminishes at greater distances. For heatwaves, we find that the effect on risk perception is driven by the recent salient summer heatwaves of 2018 and 2019. Having experienced both events also significantly increases climate change concern and pro-environmental behaviour, in addition to risk perception.