• Energy Research

Abstract Australians vary considerably in their beliefs and responses to climate change, and addressing this diversity is an important challenge faced by climate change communicators. This study used audience segmentation analysis to identify the main climate change interpretive communities within Australia. A nationwide sample consisting of 3096 residents (aged 15–108 years, 47% male and 53% female) completed an online survey assessing a broad range of cognitive, affective, and behavioural constructs related to climate change. Latent profile analysis applied to the psychological variables suggested that this Australian sample consists of five distinct interpretive communities: Alarmed (26%), Concerned (39%), Uncertain (14%), Doubtful (12%), and Dismissive (9%). Validation analyses revealed that these groups differed in their: (1) behavioural responses to climate change, (2) consumption of climate change related media, and (3) preferences for energy policies. Recommendations are presented for developing more effective climate change communications by tailoring and targeting communications to specific interpretive communities.

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Although wood smoke pollution has been linked to health problems, wood burning remains a popular form of domestic heating in many countries across the world. In this paper, we describe the rhetoric of resistance to wood heater regulation amongst citizens in the regional Australian town of Armidale, where wood smoke levels regularly exceed national health advisory limits. We discuss how this is related to particular sources of resistance, such as affective attachment to wood heating and socio-cultural norms. The research draws on six focus groups with participants from households with and without wood heating. With reference to practice theory, we argue that citizen discourses favouring wood burning draw upon a rich suite of justifications and present this activity as a natural and traditional activity promoting comfort and cohesion. Such discourses also emphasise the identity of the town as a rural community and the supposed gemeinschaft qualities of such places. We show that, in this domain of energy policy, it is not enough to present ‘facts’ which have little emotional association or meaning for the populace. Rather, we need understand how social scripts, often localised, inform identity and practice.

Abstract This study investigated how projected electricity prices and personal values influence public support for a 50% renewable energy target (RET) in Australia. In an online experiment, 404 participants rated their support for a 50% RET across eight projected increases in their quarterly power bills. Multi-level modelling indicated that: (1) support for the 50% RET fell as the projected price of electricity increased, (2) although participants with low self-enhancement values and high self-transcendent values were most supportive of the 50% RET, these value-based differences disappeared as projected electricity prices increased. Implications of these findings for energy policy design are discussed.

A sample of 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the premier tertiary institution in the Pacific Islands, answered a range of questions intended to understand future island decision-makers’ attitudes towards Nature and concern about climate change. Questions asking about church attendance show that the vast majority of participants have spiritual values that explain their feelings of connectedness to Nature which in turn may account for high levels of pessimism about the current state of the global/Pacific environment. Concern about climate change as a future livelihood stressor in the Pacific region is ubiquitous at both societal and personal levels. While participants exhibited a degree of understanding matching objective rankings about the vulnerability of their home islands/countries, a spatial optimism bias was evident in which ‘other places’ were invariably regarded as ‘worse’. Through their views on climate change concern, respondents also favoured a psychological distancing of environmental risk in which ‘other places’ were perceived as more exposed than familiar ones. Influence from spirituality is implicated in both findings. Most interventions intended to reduce exposure to environmental risk and to enable effective and sustainable adaptation to climate change in the Pacific Islands region have failed to acknowledge influences on decisionmaking of spirituality and connectedness to Nature. Messages that stress environmental conservation and stewardship, particularly if communicated within familiar and respected religious contexts, are likely to be more successful than secular ones.