The role of personal experiences in Norwegian perceptions of climate change

ABSTRACT

It is commonly assumed that personal experiences of a changing climate will influence people’s attitudes to the extent that they will be more likely to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change as a real threat and therefore be more willing to accept both mitigation and adaptation efforts. In the article, the authors examine how survey participants’ personal experiences of extreme events and climate-related changes in the natural environment influenced their perceptions of climate change. Using data from a nationally representative survey conducted in Norway in 2015 and the results of logistic regressions, the authors find that individual observations of changes in nature were linked to higher levels of concern with regard to climate change, as well as to attitudes that were more positive towards personal mitigation and adaption efforts. Somewhat counter-intuitively, they also find that participants who had personally experienced a natural hazard event were less concerned about climate change compared with participants without such experiences. The authors conclude that personal experience of the consequences of climate change may in some cases have a limited effect on enhancing people’s concerns about climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• change in the natural environment
• climate change
• natural hazard
• perceptions of climate change
• personal experience

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editor and reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions. We also thank Sabrina Scherzer, Gunhild Setten, Catriona Turner, and the participants of the Geography Research Seminar at the Norwegian University of Technology and Science (NTNU) and the 8th Conference of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRiM) for discussions and feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Left-wing parties – Norwegian Labour Party, Red Party, and Socialist Left Party; centre parties – Centre Party, Liberal Party, and Christian Democrats; right-wing parties –Conservative Party and Progress Party

2 We included both international organizations (e.g. Greenpeace, Zero, and the WWF) and Norwegian organizations (e.g. Bellona, and Nature and Youth).

3 The results are included in the Replication do-file (Mendeley 2020) and can be accessed from the authors upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (grant no. RCN 235490).