Courtesy of Patrick Beaudouin
Here’s a question: Which of these two descriptions will attract more public support for the technology known as direct air capture and carbon sequestration?
- Direct air capture and carbon sequestration are highly engineered technologies designed to artificially extract carbon dioxide from the air. Air is funneled through synthetic filters or chemically altered solutions … Once captured, the carbon dioxide is compressed and injected underground, trapped in artificial reservoirs under high pressure, where it remains for thousands of years.
- Direct air capture and carbon sequestration are technologies that mimic natural processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Like the way plants pull carbon dioxide from the air through their leaves, filters collect carbon dioxide … Once collected, the carbon dioxide is transformed and stored deep underground, much like how the Earth has trapped carbon in its soil and rock layers for thousands of years.
Probably the second one, which refers to “plants,” “soil,” and “thousands of years,” according to Leaf Van Boven of University of Colorado Boulder. Like food, technology that counters climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the air can be presented as “natural” and thus familiar and safe, says Van Boven. “People will support technologies to a greater extent when they see them as ‘natural,’ ” he says.
Courtesy of Patrick Beaudouin
Van Boven was one of 14 researchers who gathered at Stanford Graduate School of Business in early December to discuss such quirks of human preference. Over a day and a half, speakers at the conference, Human Behavior and Climate Change: From Individual to Collective Action, presented their research on public attitudes toward climate change and technologies designed to counter it. They also discussed how individuals and communities around the world adapt to climate change through migration and other means. About 60 scholars, students, and industry leaders attended the conference.
Stanford Graduate School of Business Business, Government & Society Initiative, which supports social and environmental research, presented the event in collaboration with Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. The conference was chaired by GSB’s Helena Miton and SDSS’s Nicole Ardoin, Sara Constantino, and Madalina Vlasceanu.
Speakers agreed that policymakers and communities addressing climate change must understand complicated human attitudes and motivations. Because many people don’t trust institutions and readily believe falsehoods about the climate, it’s difficult to develop effective solutions that the public will adopt. Nonetheless, speakers said, there’s reason for optimism: Individual communities have pursued small-scale projects designed to encourage recycling and mitigate hot spots in urban areas. Additionally, there may be ways to communicate with climate skeptics to encourage them to reconsider their beliefs, some researchers said.
Unsure about the Untried
While describing a technology as “natural” may increase public acceptance, it’s still hard to persuade some, such as those who aren’t well-informed. Describing her research, Shahzeen Attari of Indiana University Bloomington said people who weren’t familiar with electric vehicles and heat pumps, which are more efficient than conventional air conditioners, are more likely to resist them. The same is true for those who agreed with false statements about the availability of vehicle chargers and the need for a backup to a heat pump. On the flip side, the more familiar consumers were with a technology, the more likely they were to own it, and someone who believed accurate information about one technology was more likely to be well-informed about another, Attari added.
Disseminating accurate information may increase public acceptance, but sometimes a technology may still never take off. Terre Satterfield of the University of British Columbia said the idea of removing carbon from the air is generally popular. But her research also found that some still question whether the removal technology could harm ocean ecosystems or raise the risk of earthquakes. “Some things never gain trust,” Satterfield said.
A Matter of Trust
Do people have faith that existing democratic institutions can address climate change? Some don’t, said Dylan Bugden of Washington State University, who found that many of the 363 self-identified Democrats responding to a survey agreed with the statements “we need to give up some of our rights to stop climate change” and “our country needs a strong leader who is willing to break the rules in order to stop climate change.” And the less trust individuals had in political institutions, the more they agreed with the need for authoritarianism. “This reflects a long history of debate of whether democracy is capable of solving the ecological crisis,” Bugden noted.
Nor is trust in the scientific community a given. Although climate skeptics may be well-informed about how scientists work and find funding, they also commonly believe that scientists invented a climate change hoax by agreeing to fake their data and spread falsehoods, said Barbara Malt of Lehigh University. But because hoax believers rarely consider how and why scientists would actually agree to such a pact, asking them to explain the supposed ploy in detail might lead them to question their beliefs, she said.
Environmentalists can also turn to specific and precise information when they’re trying to win the trust of skeptics, said Michael Ranney of University of California, Berkeley. Try telling them, for instance, that according to a 2009 study of nine years of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there were 204 record temperature highs in the U.S. for every 100 record temperature lows. “Arm environmentalists with information that they find useful in compelling others,” he said.
Responses and Resilience
Communities concerned about climate change are joining with researchers, local governments, and nonprofits to take action. In East Boston and Chelsea, Mass., expanses of black asphalt and a dearth of trees create heat islands, or areas that are hotter than nearby neighborhoods, said Patricia Fabian of Boston University. In a recent partnership with BU and local organizations, residents of those heat islands tracked temperatures with sensors, photographed treeless neighborhoods, and mapped clusters of vulnerable individuals, said Fabian. That documentation supported a project to plant trees in the hot spots and take other initiatives to cool them.
Around the world, people often migrate in response to climate change, with both heat waves and cyclones increasing the chances that a member of a family will move, noted University of Colorado Boulder’s Amanda Carrico, who studies migration in Bangladesh. Extreme climate events can make traveling long distances more difficult, keeping people within their country and impeding international migration.
In drought-prone northern Kenya, too, households manage climate risk through various ways including migrating and using financial savings, said Anne Pisor of Penn State University. Research data examining climate patterns such as frequency and severity of droughts can also guide how households can best cope during a drought. And data showing when a household receives cash remittances from a family member working overseas can suggest when remittances are most helpful during an extreme climate event, she added.
In some areas, people turn to illegal activities to adapt. On Pemba Island in Tanzania, rains and the length of seasons are becoming less predictable, leaving households facing unexpected periods with no income when they can’t farm, said Jeffrey Andrews of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Some turn to illegal tree harvesting and sand mining. Local governments or organizations may try giving families money to support them through periods when they have no other income. As for long-term solutions, “anything you can do to build the wealth” and increase household assets will help, Andrews said.
Influencing People, Influencing Behavior
Sometimes what influences people isn’t obvious. Wesley Schultz of Claremont Graduate University found that those who were encouraged to cut their energy use in order to save money or protect the environment didn’t reduce their consumption as much as those who were prompted to “join your neighbors in conserving energy.” That message may have made them believe that others were already conserving and would approve of those who do the same. “People largely don’t see (their beliefs in what others do) as influential, even though they are,” said Schultz.
Likewise, people are often wrong when they estimate how much an action will reduce carbon output, said Tobias Brosch of University of Geneva. Many think recycling has the same impact as taking public transportation (it doesn’t). Because people are bad at estimating, they may require heavier-handed advice spelling out effective ways to cut carbon output, Brosch said. The advice “we know that the most effective actions include avoiding flying” may not help people estimate the environmental impact of flying as well as “avoid one medium-distanced round trip between, for instance, New York and Miami, within a year.”
Incentives, too, can encourage environmentally friendly actions. Raisa Sherif of Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance found that students in Kerala, India, who received advice plus an incentive (a school certificate and tea with a celebrity) were the most enthusiastic participants in an effort to recycle plastic bags. In another study, Sherif found that given a chance to win a small amount of cash in a lottery, students were willing to pledge a portion of their winnings to promote other actions like planting trees and recycling paper.
Marco Janssen of Arizona State University has researched the use of games to encourage residents in Andhra Pradesh, India, to use less groundwater. Ultimately, it’s less effective for outsiders to impose climate solutions on a community. “Groups are more likely to cooperate if they communicate” and create their own rules, Janssen said.
