People who have been impacted by storms and heatwaves are more likely than other groups to believe climate adaptation is a community responsibility. But they also tend to think they won’t be affected in the future.
That’s one of the surprising conclusions of researchers in the Netherlands and US, who surveyed more than 700 inhabitants of New York City.
The team also found that Hispanic and African American people are more likely to believe that future storms and heatwaves will be severe, and that adaptation is a personal responsibility.
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Diana Reckien who was previously at Columbia University, US, and is now at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and colleague Elisaveta Petkova at Columbia believe that perception matters when it comes to who is affected most under climate change, what would help, and who should help. For instance, if someone believes it is the responsibility of a community to help people adapt to climate change, then that person might be less inclined to take action themselves.
On the flip side, Reckien cites cooling centres for use during heatwaves: “If you implement cooling centres in areas where citizens believe it is their own task to adapt, they probably won’t inform themselves about [them] and hence won’t go.”
The fact that people who’d been affected by storms and heatwaves were more likely to see adaptation as a community measure could be due, say the researchers, to those respondents knowing that they are not able to cope by themselves.
But the finding that those people were generally not worried by future storms and heatwaves – or believed they will not be affected – was more surprising. The researchers suggest that such people could be experiencing an “optimism bias”, or even the “gambler’s fallacy” – the mistaken belief that once something happens to you, you are less likely to see it occur in future.
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For the finding that minority ethnic communities tend to believe they will suffer from storms and heatwaves, and that they as individuals are responsible for adaptation, the researchers suggest that a neglect, or perceived neglect, of these communities by the government could be the cause.
“Local government support is highly needed,” says Reckien, who thinks this support can help because citizens who have been affected already hold local government responsible for adaptation, and because minority ethnic citizens need “a particular education, communication and awareness-raising process” to encourage a view that the community can take charge.
To expose such perceptions, Reckien and Petkova conducted an online survey with residents of New York, focusing on the effects of – and mitigation schemes for – storms and heatwaves. They took into account factors such as gender, age, ethnicity, housing, family and income. Of some 1200 attempts at the survey, 762 were completed.
Reckien, who reported the findings in Environmental Research Letters (ERL), now plans to investigate which are the best levels within a community to take responsibility for adaptation.
