Influence of climate change communication on cognitive, emotional and behavioural engagement with adaptation among forest owners in Sweden

This thesis examines if, and how, climate change communication can promote individual engagement with adaptation. It tests if communication can affect intrapsychic conditions, behavioural intentions and individual action related to adaptation. To assess the effect of communication on individual engagement with adaptation, the thesis examines two different communication approaches: transmission-orientated and deliberation-orientated. To test the first approach, the thesis compares survey responses from 2014 of two different groups of forest owners from Sweden: Forest owners who participated in two climate change communication projects by the Swedish Forest Agency; and a group of randomly selected forest owners. To examine the second approach, the thesis evaluates results from a fourand-a-half-year long panel survey of 45 forest owners that participated in a communication project based on the concept of science-based stakeholder dialogues. The panel survey took place between 2013 and 2018. The thesis also uses qualitative data to complement the statistical analysis of the panel survey. Key findings include: First, intrapsychic conditions – personal appraisal of climate change risk, concern, trust in climate science, belief in personal knowledge, experience of extreme events and attribution of these experiences to climate change – can help explain individual engagement with adaptation. Second, both approaches to climate change communication have only a small effect on intrapsychic conditions, intentions and personal behaviour. Third, the potential of communication to promote engagement with climate change hinges on its perceived credibility, legitimacy and practical value. Fourth, the thesis highlights the limits of the psychological approach to research about individual adaptation and the need to understand climate change communication in its socioeconomic context. The thesis offers boundary organisations insights into how to create credible, science-based and actionable knowledge. More long-term, mixed-method research is needed to better understand the influence of social norms and personal values on people’s engagement with adaptation, and how communication can be combined with structural incentives to foster individual and collective action

The relative importance of subjective and structural factors for individual adaptation to climate change by forest owners in Sweden

A growing body of literature argues that subjective factors can more accurately explain individual adaptation to climate change than objective measurers of adaptive capacity. Recent studies have shown that personal belief in climate change and affect are much better in explaining climate awareness and action than income, education or gender. This study focuses on the process of individual adaptation to climate change. It assesses and compares the influence of cognitive, experiential and structural factors on individuals’ views and intentions regarding climate change adaptation. Data from this study comes from a survey with 836 forest owners in Sweden. Ordinal and binary logistic regression was used to test hypotheses about the different factors. Results show that cognitive factors—namely personal level of trust in climate science, belief in the salience of climate change and risk assessment—are the only statistically significant factors that can directly explain individuals’ intention to adapt to climate change and their sense of urgency. Findings also suggest that structural or socio-demographic factors do not have a statistically significant influence on adaptation decision-making among Swedish forest owners. The study also offers valuable insights for communication interventions to promote adaptation. Findings strongly suggest that communication interventions should focus more strongly on building trust and addressing stakeholders’ individual needs and experiences

The effect of forest owner decision-making, climatic change and societal demands on land-use change and ecosystem service provision in Sweden

The uncertain effects of climatic change and changing demands for ecosystem services on the distribution of forests and their levels of service provision require assessments of future land-use change, ecosystem service provision, and how ecosystem service demands may be met. We present CRAFTY-Sweden, an agent-based, land-use model that incorporates land owner behaviour and decision-making in modelling future ecosystem service provision in the Swedish forestry sector. Future changes were simulated under scenarios of socio-economic and climatic change between 2010 and 2100. The simulations indicate that the influence of climatic change (on land productivities) may be less important than that of socio-economic change or behavioural differences. Simulations further demonstrate that the variability in land owner and societal behaviour has a substantial role in determining the direction and impact of land-use change. The results indicate a sizeable increase in timber harvesting in coming decades, which together with a substantial decoupling between supply and demand for forest ecosystem services highlights the challenge of continuously meeting demands for ecosystem services over long periods of time. There is a clear need for model applications of this kind to better understand the variation in ecosystem service provision in the forestry sector, and other associated land-use changes

Sustainability-linked bonds - their potential to promote issuers’ transition to net-zero emissions and future research directions

Sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs) promise to complement the use-of-proceed model of green bonds by tying general purpose debt finance to issuers’ sustainability performance against predefined targets. In this commentary, we highlight that the potential of SLBs to promote issuers’ climate transitions crucially depends on a common understanding of eligible economic activities and material performance indicators, the use of science-based targets as best practice, the ability of borrowers to dispel concerns about greenwashing risk, and bond characteristics that set meaningful incentives for issuers to improve their carbon performance. Future research should investigate the climate-related additionality of SLBs, assess if bond characteristics and changes in capital costs support issuers in meeting or even increasing their climate targets and deter unsustainable investments, and better understand the challenges and opportunities for the SLB market to bring about system-level innovation to the financial system.Validerad;2024;Nivå 1;2024-03-19 (hanlid);Full text license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0</p

Scaling up rooftop solar power in India: The potential of municipal solar bonds

India has made great progress in reaching its ambitious goal to scale up renewable energy capacity to 175 GW in 2022. Solar power plays a central part in achieving this goal and installations of utility scale power have seen a dramatic increase in the last few years. Rooftop solar, however, is lagging and more needs to be done to achieve its 40 GW capacity target by 2022. To meet the remaining rooftop target, this study estimates that the total capital requirement could be as high as USD 31.8 billion in addition to current subsidies and USD 39 billion excluding subsidies. The study suggests that municipalities can play a larger role in the acceleration of rooftop solar in India and proposes the use of municipal bonds to support the scale up of rooftop solar in India and details how such bonds could be designed and implemented. The study also applies proposed bond model to two Indian cities- Surat and New Delhi (NDMC) and illustrates how municipal bonds can significantly reduce the costs for rooftop solar and make it competitive and benefit different type of consumers in these cities