Climate Decision-Making

Climate change decision-making has emerged in recent decades as an area of research and practice, expanding on an earlier focus on climate policy. Defined as the study of decisions relevant for climate change, it draws on developments in decision science, particularly advances in the study of cognitive and deliberative processes in individuals and organizations. The effects of climate, economic, social, and other framings on decision-making have been studied, often showing that nonclimate frames can be as effective as, or more effective than, climate frames in promoting decision-making and action. The concept of urgency, linked to the ideas of climate crisis and climate emergency, has taken on importance in recent years. Research on climate decision-making has influenced numerous areas of climate action, including nudges and other behavioral interventions, corporate social responsibility, and Indigenous decision-making. Areas of transformational change, such as strategic retreat in the face of sea-level rise, are emerging

An interdisciplinary assessment of climate engineering strategies

Author Posting. © Ecological Society of America, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of Ecological Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12 (2014): 280–287, doi:10.1890/130030.Mitigating further anthropogenic changes to the global climate will require reducing greenhouse-gas emissions (“abatement”), or else removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and/or diminishing solar input (“climate engineering”). Here, we develop and apply criteria to measure technical, economic, ecological, institutional, and ethical dimensions of, and public acceptance for, climate engineering strategies; provide a relative rating for each dimension; and offer a new interdisciplinary framework for comparing abatement and climate engineering options. While abatement remains the most desirable policy, certain climate engineering strategies, including forest and soil management for carbon sequestration, merit broad-scale application. Other proposed strategies, such as biochar production and geological carbon capture and storage, are rated somewhat lower, but deserve further research and development. Iron fertilization of the oceans and solar radiation management, although cost-effective, received the lowest ratings on most criteria. We conclude that although abatement should remain the central climate-change response, some low-risk, cost-effective climate engineering approaches should be applied as complements. The framework presented here aims to guide and prioritize further research and analysis, leading to improvements in climate engineering strategies.NSF grant #1103575 supported KRMM

Public opinion about solar radiation management: A cross-cultural study in 20 countries around the world

Some argue that complementing climate change mitigation measures with solar radiation management (SRM) might prove a last resort to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. To make a socially responsible decision on whether to use SRM, it is important to consider also public opinion, across the globe and particularly in the Global South, which would face the greatest risks from both global warming and SRM. However, most research on public opinion about SRM stems from the Global North. We report findings from the first large-scale, cross-cultural study on the public opinion about SRM among the general public (N = 2,248) and students (N = 4,583) in 20 countries covering all inhabited continents, including five countries from the Global South and five ‘non-WEIRD’ (i.e. not Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) countries from the Global North. As public awareness of SRM is usually low, we provided participants with information on SRM, including key arguments in favour of and against SRM that appear in the scientific debate. On average, acceptability of SRM was significantly higher in the Global South than in the ‘non-WEIRD’ Global North, while acceptability in the ‘WEIRD’ Global North was in between. However, we found substantial variation within these clusters, especially in the ‘non-WEIRD’ Global North, suggesting that countries do not form homogenous clusters and should thus be considered individually. Moreover, the average participants’ views, while generally neither strong nor polarised, differed from some expert views in important ways, including that participants perceived SRM as only slightly effective in limiting global warming. Still, our data suggests overall a conditional, reluctant acceptance. That is, while on average, people think SRM would have mostly negative consequences, they may still be willing to tolerate it as a potential last resort to fight global warming, particularly if they think SRM has only minor negative (or even positive) impacts on humans and nature

Becoming FEW Conscious: A Conceptual Typology of Household Behavior Change Interventions Targeting the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus

The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus presents an opportunity to rethink predominant approaches to household behavior change science. We linked emerging FEW nexus research with existing literature examining household consumption and pro-environmental behaviors. While a large body of work examines the environmental impacts of household life and explores pathways to behavior change for sustainability, the literature lacks studies that test interventions in multiple FEW resource categories, leaving researchers unable to identify tensions and tradeoffs in the household system. To guide this developing field and accumulate findings on household behavior across disciplines, we proposed a conceptual typology that synthesizes interdisciplinary analytic traditions to classify behavioral interventions targeting the household FEW nexus. The typology synthesizes behavioral interventions as active, passive, or structural, and household-specific or non-specific, illustrating six distinct categories: information, tailored information, action, gamification, policy/price change, and material/technology provision. A review of 40 studies that guided the typology identifies four significant lessons for future intervention research: household non-specific information and tailored information work better together, feedback is more effective when it is persistent, price-based interventions (information or incentives) are often ineffective, and material/technology provision is very effective but utilized in few household studies. To push forward household resource consumption science, we advocated for a holistic nexus focus that is rooted in interdisciplinarity, coalition building with stakeholders, and data reporting that facilitates knowledge accumulation

The Political Complexity of Coastal Flood Risk Reduction: Lessons for Climate Adaptation Public Works in the U.S.

Abstract Coastal climate adaptation public works, such as storm surge barriers and levees, are central elements of several current proposals to limit damages from coastal storms and sea‐level rise in the United States. Academic analysis of these public works projects is dominated by technocratic and engineering‐driven frameworks. However, social conflict, laws, political incentives, governance structures, and other political factors have played pivotal roles in determining the fate of government‐led coastal flood risk reduction efforts. Here, we review the ways in which politics has enabled or hindered the conception, design, and implementation of coastal risk reduction projects in the U.S. We draw from the literature in natural hazards, infrastructure, political science, and climate adaptation and give supporting examples. Overall, we find that (1) multiple floods are often needed to elicit earnest planning; (2) strong and continuous leadership from elected officials is necessary to advance projects; (3) stakeholder participation during the design stage has improved outcomes; (4) legal challenges to procedural and substantive shortcomings under environmental protection statutes present an enduring obstacle to implementing megastructure proposals

Environmental decision-making shaped by the home: Situating consumption in the household

Research on environmentally consequential human decision-making often begins from the premise that consumption decisions are motivated by individual values. However, we argue that social science research aiming to understand consumer decision-making will benefit from integrating the lived experiences of people in households, where decisions are often influenced or mitigated by the presence of those who share homes. Conducting research on consumption decisions regarding household resources revealed the embedded nature of these decisions, which are situated in the context of the socially contingent dynamics of residential life. In this paper, we identify five social dynamic processes that influence consumption within the household: (1) referring, (2) norming, (3) enhancing, (4) constraining, and (5) allocating. These processes, embedded within the dynamic social relationships of the residential household, moderate household resource use in ways that future social science research may strive to better understand

Social Science is key to effective climate change mitigation: A reply to Nature editorial

In your editorial „How researchers can help fight climate change in 2022 and beyond” you rightly emphasize the value of emerging energy supply and end-use technologies for achieving much needed though highly ambitious GHG emission reductions. However, meeting this goal at the necessary speed is not solely a technical problem. There is a long history of promised technological solutions that never materialized. The same is true of public policy interventions. We can do better by integrating social science knowledge of why such technologies and interventions fall short and how to design implementable and scalable interventions that deliver GHG emission reductions. An integrated approach will enable better informed choices about technical and policy priorities and more effective implementation

Integrating the social sciences to enhance climate literacy

The climate literacy movement aspires to help members of the general public understand the global climate system, locate and assess scientifically credible climatic information, communicate about climate change in an educated and objective manner, and make informed and responsible decisions in response to climate‐change impacts. When these goals are not met, society will likely be further imperiled by the effects of a changing climate. Climate literacy programs have traditionally promoted education on the biophysical science of the climate system but have largely failed to integrate relevant knowledge from the social sciences. We argue that understanding human behavior and the social drivers of climate change are essential for the public to fully appreciate the climate system, and that this knowledge can inform decision making related to climate‐change mitigation and adaptation. Teaching students to evaluate different forms of evidence will also improve climate literacy and lead them to ask how scientists know what they know. Finally, we suggest two new social science principles that could advance interdisciplinary climate literacy goals