Climate Justice Distribution and Public Attitudes Toward Climate Actions in USA

Chingwen Cheng (Arizona State University The Design School)

Climate justice reveals places that have high probability of climate change associated hazards, high socially vulnerable populations, and low social-ecological adaptive capacity. Prioritizing adaptation planning and actions for the most vulnerable populations would achieve a more equitable future across communities. However, little is known about how public attitudes towards climate actions are driven by disproportionate impacts felt by vulnerable communities. This study advances the literature by investigating the spatial patterns and relationship between people’s attitude towards climate actions in climate justice communities in the USA.

Guided by the vulnerability assessment framework, a Climate Justice Index was constructed through Geographical Information System spatial data with a series of social, ecological, and technological vulnerability indices in corresponding to exposure (number of events and level of economic losses from climate change associated hazards from 2005 to 2015), sensitivity (socio-economic and demographic indicators such as age, gender, race, income, education, family and housing structure), and adaptive capacity (a lack of access to green infrastructure for climate change adaptation). OLS regression and spatial regression analyses were employed to explore the relationship between vulnerability indicators and public attitudes across 3142 counties in USA. Eighteen indicators derived from climate justice index were included as independent variables. Public attitudes were measured by four dependent variables extracted from 2016 Yale Climate Change national survey dataset. The results supported the hypothesis that counties with greater climate justice are significantly correlated with people who worried about climate change, who perceived personal harms from climate change, and who support for renewable energy or CO2 emission regulations. The study has implication using Climate Justice Index for investigating vulnerability of a place and people’s attitudes towards climate change in order to conduct effective communication and decision-making process for building more resilient and sustainable communities to cope with climate change.