NCCARF study finds high level of concern amongst the Australian public about climate change

Griffith University researchers have released an eye-opening report revealing a high level of concern among Australians about the immediate and future impacts of climate change.

The study 'Public Risk Perceptions, Understandings, and Responses to Climate Change in Australia and Great Britain: Interim Report'  found that 74 per cent of respondents believe the world’s climate is changing, with a further 8 per cent reporting that they don’t know.

 When separately asked about the causes of climate change, 90 per cent of respondents accepted some level of human causality. Only 5 per cent of respondents thought that climate change was entirely caused by natural processes.

Less than 6 per cent of survey respondents could be reasonably classified as true climate change sceptics.

The findings are from one of the very few in-depth or cross-national studies of public risk perceptions and understandings of climate change in Australia. It was commissioned by the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility and funded by the Australian Government Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency’s Climate Change Adaptation Research Grants program.

The survey was undertaken between June and July in 2010 and involved a geographically and demographically stratified national sample of 3096 respondents.

The research found that 20 per cent of survey respondents reported experiencing appreciable distress, at times, at the prospect of climate change and its consequences, for people, and for the world in which we live.

Environmental and social psychologist Professor Joseph Reser from Griffith’s Climate Change Response Program said the findings were consistent with public perceptions in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world, but Australian survey respondents viewed climate change as a threat that is more immediate and closer to home.

“Our findings suggest that Australians feel the threat to their local region and nation more intensely and that’s not surprising given the nature, intensity, and dramatic impacts of natural disaster events in the past few years,” Professor Reser said.

“With nonstop media images, sound bites, warning messages, and popularised science accounts of planetary threat, psychological impacts are not surprising. However, we have neglected how the threat and physical environmental consequences of climate change are impacting on the human landscape.”

NCCARF Director Professor Jean Palutikof said it was important to understand public attitudes to climate change for adaptive measures.

“Understanding people’s psychological responses is the key to the success of climate change adaptation initiatives and the acceptance of policies, programs, regulations, technologies and innovations,” Professor Palutikof said.

Other survey findings:

• 78 per cent of Australian respondents agreed that, “If nothing is done to reduce climate change in the future, it will be a ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ problem for Australia”.
• When asked, “How serious a problem do you think climate change is right now”, 45 per cent of respondents reported that it was a serious problem.
• Respondents’ knowledge level about matters relating to the underlying science of climate change and projected impacts were modest, with respondents getting, on average, four to five out of 10 true/false statements correct. These findings are interesting when compared with respondents’ self-reported knowledge level, with close to 75 per cent of respondents feeling that they knew a reasonable amount about climate change.
• 37 per cent of respondents reported having had direct personal experience with various natural disaster events. Overall, public risk perceptions and understandings of the threat of climate change in Australia appear to be strongly influenced and informed by knowledge of direct or indirect experience with both acute and chronic natural disasters in the Australian environment.
• 59 per cent of Australian respondents thought that the region where they lived was vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, with two thirds of these respondents indicating that their location was ‘very’ or ‘reasonably’ vulnerable.
• Studies in Great Britain indicate striking similarities with Australian survey, despite dramatic differences in geographic regions, climate, climate change exposure, and recent histories of extreme weather events.

Read the full report here