Personalized risk messaging can reduce climate concerns

•We report a large-n survey experiment on San Francisco Bay Area residents to investigate how providing personalized risk information shapes sea-level rise risk perceptions•Personalized risk messaging sometimes reduced concern about sea-level rise, particularly among individuals who believe in clima...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Global environmental change 2019-03, Vol.55, p.15-24
Main Authors: Mildenberger, Matto, Lubell, Mark, Hummel, Michelle
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climate change
Climate change adaptation
Climate policy
Communication
Customization
Environmental policy
Environmental risk
Respondents
Risk
Risk perception
Risk perceptions
Risk reduction
Sea level
Sea level rise
Willingness to pay
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Summary:•We report a large-n survey experiment on San Francisco Bay Area residents to investigate how providing personalized risk information shapes sea-level rise risk perceptions•Personalized risk messaging sometimes reduced concern about sea-level rise, particularly among individuals who believe in climate change•We find no effect of personalized risk information on an individual's willingness to pay for regional climate adaptation measures.•Local sea-level rise messaging strategies may not have the clear impacts that some advocates and scholars presume. One potential barrier to climate policy action is that individuals view climate change as a problem for people in other parts of the world or for future generations. As some scholars argue, risk messaging strategies that make climate change personally relevant may help overcome this barrier. In this article, we report a large-n survey experiment on San Francisco Bay Area residents to investigate how providing spatially-resolved risk information to individuals shapes their climate risk perceptions in the context of sea-level rise. Our results suggest that personalized risk messaging can sometimes reduce concern about sea-level rise. These experimental effects are limited to respondents who believe that climate change is happening. Further, we do not find an effect of providing local risk messages on an individual's willingness to pay for regional climate adaptation measures. Our results emphasize that local messaging strategies around sea-level rise risks may not have the clear impacts that some advocates and scholars presume.
ISSN:0959-3780
1872-9495
DOI:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.01.002