The effects of extreme weather events are disproportionately felt in countries in the Global South.
Most people are more likely to support climate policies if they see a connection between extreme weather and climate change, new international research has found.
A few extreme weather events also seem to influence support for climate policies in different ways, according to the team of authors, which included Marina Joubert, an associate professor at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University.
The study, published in the journal, Nature Climate Change, found that although extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense because of climate change, little is known about how experiencing these events — and attributing them to climate change — affects support for climate policies, particularly in the Global South.
The effects of extreme weather events are disproportionately felt in countries in the Global South.
“Even though the Global South is at greater risk, attribution studies and social science research on human responses to such events overwhelmingly focus on countries and populations in the Global North,” the study noted.
The study shows that when people connect extreme weather such as heatwaves, floods and droughts to climate change, they’re much more likely to support climate action, Joubert said.
“This matters for countries like South Africa where climate impacts are already being felt. One surprising finding from our study is that people in Africa, especially in South Africa, are less likely to say that climate change is behind extreme weather events,” she said.
“That’s not because the weather is not changing, but because climate change awareness is still low.”
To build support for climate solutions, there is an urgent need for better public communication that explains to people what is happening and why, Joubert said.
The researchers assessed support for the following five climate policies: increasing taxes on carbon-intense foods, raising taxes on fossil fuels, expanding infrastructure for public transportation, increasing the use of sustainable energy, and protecting forested and land areas.
They used combined large-scale natural and social science data from 68 countries to develop a measure of how many people were exposed to extreme weather events — and to explore whether this exposure, along with people’s beliefs about whether climate change has affected extreme weather events over the last decades, predict their support for climate policies.
They also comparatively assessed the link between the size of exposed populations, defined as the average annual proportion of a country’s total population exposed to a specific weather-related hazard, to several extreme weather events and support for climate policies.
They found that in line with previous research, increasing carbon taxes received the lowest support, with only 22% and 29% of people, respectively, indicating they very much supported increased taxes on carbon-intensive foods and fossil fuels.
Protecting forested and land areas, by contrast, was a popular policy option, with 82% supporting it very much and only 3% not supporting it at all. The second-most supported policy was increasing the use of sustainable energy, with 75% supporting it very much, and only 5% not supporting it at all.
The research showed that not all climate policies are equally popular, revealing that people around the world, including in Africa, are far more supportive of clean energy and forest protection than carbon taxes.
“That’s an important message for governments. If you want public buy-in, you have to focus on solutions that people understand and support,” Joubert said.
The study provides global evidence that subjective attribution of extreme weather events to climate change is associated with greater policy support for climate mitigation, the researchers said.
“Overall, different extreme weather events appear to have different relationships with climate policy support. This pattern highlights the importance of comparative analyses that consider different types of events,” the study said.
“In line with previous studies we also found that subjective attribution interacts with exposure to European winter storms, heatwaves, heavy precipitation and tropical cyclones to predict climate policy support.”
Mere exposure to extreme weather events might therefore not suffice to increase policy support unless individuals link these events to climate change.
While larger exposure to extreme events was not found to be related to policy support, except for wildfires, the researchers could not rule out that changes in the frequency of extreme weather events over time might be sufficient to shift support.
“Nevertheless, our data suggest that if individuals attribute extreme weather events to climate change, support for climate policies is higher regardless of whether the events are more frequent.”
The reverse causal relationship is also possible: people who are supportive of climate policies are more likely to attribute extreme weather to climate change, the study said, noting that longitudinal panel studies are needed to investigate the nature and direction of this relationship.
The research also found strong differences in support across countries and policies. Support for climate policies was particularly high in African and Asian countries, average in Australia, Costa Rica and the United Kingdom, and below the global average in several European countries, such as Czechia, Finland and Norway.
“Participants who identified as men, were younger, more religious, had higher education, higher income, left-leaning politics and who lived in urban areas were more likely to support climate policies,” the report said.
For some events, such as heatwaves and tropical cyclones, the effects of exposure on climate policy support were stronger for individuals who attribute extreme weather events to climate change more strongly.
“One possible explanation is that these types of extreme weather events allow for management strategies that can directly reduce the hazard itself, such as man-made flood protections, irrigation systems, prescribed burn-offs and land-use policies.
“Therefore, people may be more likely to support policies pertaining to law enforcement or economic regulations instead of climate change mitigation.”
The researchers however pointed out that exposure to most types of extreme events did not predict people’s support for climate policies. The extent to which people attributed extreme weather events to climate change varied across regions of the world.
People in South America most strongly agreed that the occurrence of extreme weather events has been affected by climate change over the last decades, especially in Brazil and Colombia. This might be explained by the fact that belief in human-caused climate change and self-reported personal experience of extreme weather events are high in Latin America.
People in Northern Europe and Africa, on the other hand, were less likely to attribute extreme weather events to climate change. In Africa, this could be explained by low levels of climate change awareness and belief in human-caused climate change across the continent.
The researchers called for more studies about effective climate change communication on types of extreme weather events that are not typically associated with climate.