The connection between climate change and natural and environmental hazards is an obvious one. Climate change and variation contribute to some hazards such as flooding, drought, heat waves, and wildfires and may be increasing the severity of others, such as hurricanes. Climate-generated environmental changes will amplify the impacts of future disasters; for example, sea level rise and the erosion of coastal ecosystems will intensify the impacts of coastal storms, and pest infestations and drought will make forest ecosystems more vulnerable to wildfires. Other climate-hazard interactions include feedback effects; hazards like wildfires and volcanoes influence climate through their effects on the atmosphere.
What do we know: What does Sociology bring to the table for studying the human dimensions of global climate change?
There is another way in which climate and hazards are related, which involves how insights derived from research on natural and environmental hazards can be transferred to better understand various dimensions of climate change as a societal issue In fact, it may not be too much of a stretch to argue that a considerable amount of what has been learned—and not yet learned—about the societal dimensions of hazards and disasters is directly applicable to climate- related issues. Key areas of overlap include the following:
• Risk perception and awareness
• Risk communication
• Mitigation of negative impacts
• Agenda setting
• The role of politics and economics Risk Perception and Action
US research supports the notion that hazards and their management do not rank high as issues, either for the public or for political leaders. This is especially true for parts of the country that are not highly-hazard prone. Even in areas where hazards are widely recognized and risk perception is high, other issues such as crime, schools, and jobs take precedence. Political careers are not based on advocating for disaster loss reduction, owing in part to the limited time horizons of most political leaders. Relative to other societal problems, hazards command only very limited media and public attention, except in the aftermath of major disasters. Even then, public concern is short-lived, focusing primarily on the plight of victims in the immediate aftermath of disasters.
Hazard risk perception and concern are influenced by a wide variety of factors, including education and other indicators of socioeconomic status; past experience with hazards; community attachment; gender; race; ethnicity; and family composition. With respect to technological risks, perceptions are also associated with trust in institutions, broader world views, and political beliefs.
Common responses to the possibility of catastrophic events include “it won’t happen,” and “it may happen, but it won’t affect me.”
Unsurprisingly, the relationship between hazard risk perception and willingness to undertake loss-reduction measures is not a straightforward one, whether the unit of analysis under consideration is a household, a business, or a community. Whether awareness and concern translate into action depends on a number of other factors, including the capacity to act, where capacity is broadly understood as encompassing knowledge, belief in the efficacy of loss- reduction measures, leadership, networked capabilities, and economic resources. Activity is often context dependent; decisions made at higher levels of aggregation (e.g., the nation, the state and community level) affect capacity and provide incentives for actions at other levels.
Risk Communication
The field of risk communication spans many types of risks in addition to those associated with hazards, including in particular risks to life, health, and safety. The same general principles of effective risk communication (and lessons learned from risk communication failures) are transferable across various domains. Hazards and climate change have enough in common that lessons from the study of hazard risk communication should be immediately transferable.
Experience and research on hazard-related risk communication suggest the following: (1) scenarios, particularly those with visual impact, are good risk communication tools; (2) societal diversity is a critical factor affecting trust in individuals, organizations, and institutions involved in communicating about hazards; (3) ephemeral sources of communication, such as television and radio, are significantly less effective in communicating about hazards than print media; and (4) the information technology revolution has had a major impact on the risk communication process in several ways: that members of the public now have access to a wide variety of information sources (including peer-to-peer and social networking communication technologies); the distinction between information sources and information recipients has been blurred; and the role of more-institutionalized “experts” and “authorities” has likely been attenuated.
At the same time, some institutions have managed to become trusted sources of information concerning some hazards, particularly in the context of actual disaster events. For example, the National Hurricane Center, the US Geological Survey, and the National Weather Service are highly credible sources of information on hurricanes, earthquakes, and extreme weather events, respectively. In contrast, DHS appears not to have achieved credibility in the area of terrorist threats, and pronouncements by agencies such as EPA and FEMA tend to be regarded with suspicion (the “asymmetry principle” applies here: once trust is lost, it is very difficult to regain). Moves to establish a National Climate Service within NOAA partly constitute efforts to identify a credible and trustworthy source of information on climate-related issues.
Mitigation of Negative Impacts
The hazards and climate change communities unfortunately use the term mitigation in two different ways. In the hazards area, the term refers to actions that can be taken in advance of disaster events to reduce disaster impacts and losses or to avoid them entirely. Hazard mitigation measures include the relocation of communities or parts of communities, land-use policies, building code adoption and enforcement, and the retrofitting of hazardous structures. Mitigation is viewed as one phase in the cycle of disaster management; the other three phases are preparedness,
response, and recovery. In the climate change field, the term mitigation refers to measures designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while the term adaptation is used to describe activities that reduce the effects of climate change on the natural and built environment. From a hazards perspective, the very broad use of the concept of adaptation by climate scientists serves to blur important distinctions among different types of adaptive strategies. This is especially true with respect to the types of activities that fall under the rubric of disaster mitigation.
Taking steps to mitigate the effects of disasters is difficult for several reasons. Mitigation efforts tend to be expensive, but more important is the fact that it is easier to oppose mitigation investments than it is to oppose response and recovery expenditures once a disaster has occurred. Compared with disaster preparedness measures (e.g., developing plans, stockpiling supplies, training) mitigation also tends to require specialized technical expertise— another reason why it is expensive. Additionally, of critical importance is the fact that within the US federal system, the adoption and implementation of many mitigation activities falls within the purview of local governments, and those governmental units are typically influenced most by the same real estate and development interests that are most likely to oppose mitigation. States and the federal government also play important roles in the mitigation process, but even in such cases the actions of local jurisdictions still have an impact. Moreover, until the passage of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, federal funds for mitigation projects only became available to local communities after they had experienced disasters—and even then only for certain mitigation activities. Consequently, the current US hazard mitigation landscape is a patchwork of differing approaches in which some communities and regions are afforded protection from some hazards (but not others), while others remain vulnerable, often as a matter of conscious choice. Agenda Setting
Reducing losses from disasters has been described as “a policy without a public,” in that no large grass-roots constituency has developed around the issue. Instead, disaster reduction moves on and off political agendas as a function of several factors. In some cases, elite groups consisting, for example, of scientists, engineers, and other technical experts are successful in mobilizing support (and neutralizing opposition) for loss-reduction measures. In others, policy entrepreneurs and political champions are able to persuade political leaders and members of the public to adopt hazard-reduction policies. These same groups and their political allies occasionally succeed in establishing institutions that are charged with advocating for loss reduction policies; the California Seismic Safety Commission is one such example. Additionally, as suggested in the preceding section, actions undertaken by federal and state governments can influence hazard-related policymaking at state and local levels.
While many policy advances have been made during non-disaster times, it is disaster events themselves that are often key factors in helping to set political agendas. The literature emphasizes the extent to which disasters open windows of opportunity for the advancement of loss-reduction policies, both because they make disaster-related issues immediately salient and because they (temporarily) weaken opposition. Skillful policy advocates can even capitalize on the occurrence of disasters in other parts of the world to advance local and national policies, as happened with seismic retrofit legislation in Los Angeles after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and with US tsunami warning systems after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunamis.
Politics, Economics, and Hazards
Current scholarship in the fields of hazards and disasters emphasizes the ways in which disaster losses are produced not by so-called forces of nature but rather by normal societal processes that create and allocate risk. Disasters are not unusual events but rather are understandable and explainable in the context of the societies in which they occur: axes of development and underdevelopment, North-South power differences, the exercise of political and economic influence, and the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits that flow “naturally” from decisions made by local,
national, and international elites. In the US, Hurricane Katrina vividly illustrated this point, which had been made earlier by a number of disaster researchers.
Within the context of the current economic crisis, the US economic system has been described as privatizing gains and socializing losses. Not surprisingly, this is essentially what has been occurring with respect to hazards and disasters. Elites benefit from laws, policies, and practices that exacerbate the potential for future disaster losses, while taxpayers underwrite the losses when those disasters occur.
A political economy focus also reveals that under certain circumstances, when their own interests are in jeopardy, influential institutional actors can become advocates for disaster loss reduction, albeit on a limited basis. For example, the US insurance industry has sought federal government backing for catastrophic hazard insurance protection and engaged in efforts to promote the adoption of hazard mitigation measures through organizations such as the industry-sponsored Institute for Business and Home Safety. To the extent that insurers and re-insurers seek predictability in their own risks and their exposure to catastrophic payouts, their interests align with those of disaster loss reduction advocates in other sectors. In many respects, hazards management involves a continual search for ways of bringing about such alignments.
What do we need to know? What are the major sociological research questions? Hazards and Climate Change: How Similar, How Different?
The foregoing sections have briefly summarized findings from the literature on societal dimensions of hazards that may inform our understanding of climate change issues. This effort at comparing hazards and climate change raises a number of questions, such as the following:
• To what extent is a hazards framework useful for understanding behavior with respect to climate issues? What are its strengths? Its limitations? Is climate change so different from other hazards that new theoretical and analytic frameworks are needed?
• What are the best strategies for communicating about climate issues with the public? With decision makers at different levels of government and within different sectors? Should climate change be included in “all hazards” risk communication and education efforts, and if so, how? What role does climate information (as opposed to other types of information) actually play in climate-relevant decisions? How much science is enough science?
• What are the respective roles of public opinion, experts, and interest groups in the climate change policy process?
• How can climate change remain on national, state, and local political agendas as other issues assume more pressing importance? If disaster events help focus the attention of the public and political leaders on hazard- related issues, can events that result from climate change, variation, and extremes be used in the same way by policy advocates?
• What are the characteristics of the climate change policy network? How do different elite actors and sectors align with respect to mitigation and adaptation choices? To what extent are their positions consistent with broader goals of climate change mitigation, adaptation, and sustainability?
• What actions can federal, state, and regional entities take to encourage information dissemination and the adoption of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies? To what extent can local, state, and sectoral initiatives influence federal level decision making?