How natural disasters affect our views

17 01 2024

Can the personal experience of a natural disaster – such as a violent storm, flood or killer heatwave – change someone’s views on observed climate change?

On 16 January 2024, a seminar of the Centre for Systemic Risk Analysis at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw was held. Our guests were researchers from the Department of Social Dynamics Studies of the Faculty of Sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań: Prof. UAM, Dr Piotr Jabkowski, Prof. UAM, Dr Piotr Matczak and Dr Piotr Cichocki, who presented the preliminary results of their research on “Do disaster experiences impact public opinion on climate change in European countries?”.

Abstract

Do disaster experiences impact public opinion on climate change in European countries?

Piotr Cichocki, Piotr Jabkowski, Piotr Matczak

Public opinion has been identified as an essential factor for effective climate policy implementation, and many studies explore socio-economic determinants of public perception of climate change, its causes, and consequences. Besides, several analyses focused on how far experiencing events related to climate change (such as extreme and rapid weather events, temperature anomalies, and natural disasters) influence opinion on climate. (1984) “window of opportunity” thesis suggests that willingness to accept some climate policy increases during and shortly after an event but declines afterwards. Thus, the “window of opportunity” argument has profound climate change policy implications; at the same time, the mechanism is under-researched as existing studies offer a confusing picture of the issue. Some studies claimed the impact of experience on opinion about climate change. Taking floods that occurred in England in 2015 as a case study of a disaster event, Demski et al. (2017) demonstrated that direct experience of flooding leads to an overall increased salience of climate change, while Spence et al. (2011) indicated that experience floods lead to more concern over climate change. In turn, the analysis based on four waves of a representative population survey in Germany and weather records from the postal code areas where respondents live showed that experiencing seasonal temperature changes influences personal climate change concerns and the willingness to mitigate climate change (Pfeifer & Otto, 2023). At the same time, several studies demonstrated no impact of disasters on public opinion. Based on the individual-level multi-wave panel survey data in Germany collected from 2016 to 2019 with weather data from 514 weather stations, Gärtner and Schoen (2021) indicated that personally experiencing unusual or extreme local weather did not shape people’s awareness of climate change. Similarly, a study by Whitmarsh (2008) conducted among flood sufferers in the south of England indicated that experience has negligible impact on understanding causes and accepting responses to climate change. Besides, a few studies explored how individuals perceive changes in climate-related events over time and how specific weather events impact their subjective well-being. The findings of these studies suggest that people tend to notice and be affected by increases in events such as flooding and heavy rainfall, with potentially long-lasting effects on life satisfaction. For instance, Taylor et al. (2014) used the UK national survey data to demonstrate that heat waves and hot summers were perceived as less common during respondents’ lifetimes, while flooding, periods of heavy rainfall, coastal erosions, and mild winters were perceived to have increased in frequency and cold winters were perceived to be unchanged. In turn, the study by von Möllendorff and Hirschfeld (2016) utilised German representative panel data (2000–2011) to demonstrate the significant reduction of life satisfaction due to storms, hail events, and floods; the effect from floods persists much longer. Summarizing previous results, we can indicate that: (a) no explicit agreement can be found in the literature whether experiencing extreme climatic/weather conditions impacts peoples’ opinion or behaviour; (b) a various set of socio-demographic, psychological and other contextual variables are claimed to influence perception of climatic/weather conditions and events; (c) studies vary conceptually and geographically, which makes it challenging to derive a model of the influence of experiencing the conditions and events on the opinion on climate change.