To involve the population in adaptation strategies to climate disasters, it is better to focus on elements of the neighborhood that everyone knows well.
Would a general communication of a possible fire risk make you act more quickly, or would the possibility of a fire breaking out in the grove where you walk your dog every day? Mentioning how a climate disaster might affect the area where a person lives increases that person’s willingness to collaborate on adaptation policies.
This is confirmed by research by the Sustainability Research Center of the Stockholm School of Economics published on Nature Human Behavior: The discovery could help develop low-cost, soft persuasion strategies to increase resilience to the climate crisis.
Adaptation: words are important
Even if many climate disasters are not entirely preventable or avoidable, much can be done to be prepared in case they occur: this is the question of adaptation, a theme at the center of the recent COP30. Structural adaptation policies in the nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis require (a lot of) money. But this does not mean that all interventions, everywhere, have to be complex and expensive. Sometimes you just need to slightly vary how you communicate a message to get real results.
Field experiment
The scientists tested the effect on around 13,000 homeowners in bushfire-prone areas in Australia, who they wanted to involve in an adaptation plan to improve home safety. They sent them emails to encourage them to adopt protective behaviors, such as removing flammable materials around their homes, or regularly cleaning gutters of debris to prevent windblown embers from starting fires on their roofs.
Those who received localized messages mentioning their neighborhood were twice as likely to learn more about possible adaptation measures than citizens who received generic communications.
Behavioral interventions
“We know that climate threats often seem distant and abstract,” explains Nurit Nobel, lead author of the study. “By mentioning people’s neighborhood of residence, the communication transformed an otherwise widespread and uncertain risk into something concrete and understandable.”
In fact, while much emphasis has been placed, so far, on the concrete behaviors that we can implement to reduce CO2 emissions (mitigation), not as much has been done to prepare the population to face extreme climatic events already underway, such as fires, flash floods, heat waves (adaptation). Yet a few key measures could keep the population safe, and save governments, individual homeowners and insurance companies some of the astronomical costs of rebuilding.
