Raising awareness of climate change causes? Cross-national evidence for the normalization of societal risk perception of climate change

Abstract

Increasing the awareness of climate change causes is often considered the key to public support of mitigation and adaptation policies. However, higher awareness might not always relate to higher risk perceptions. Previous research suggests that a process of risk normalization might occur, wherein individuals more exposed and aware of hazards minimize their risk perception to psychologically cope with hazards. This study elaborates on and expands this research, by conducting multilevel analyses on more recent data from the International Social Survey Programme from 33 countries (N = 46,221). Results show that in countries with higher carbon dioxide emissions, where people are more exposed to the activities and technologies related to climate change, individuals tend to have lower societal risk perceptions of climate change due to their higher awareness of climate change causes. New insight is provided, as results confirm this effect of risk normalization after controlling for the country socioeconomic context and individual-level covariates (gender, age, education, political orientation, place of living). Of most relevance, results further illustrate that this effect is moderated by the environmental concern of individuals.