The growing need for people to learn to live with the effects of climate change has spurred great scholarly in adaptation. Recently, scholars have extended psychosocial frameworks of individual behavioral responses to natural hazards and human health risks to the domain of climate change. However, findings about the relative influence of people's appraisals of risk and the potential to respond in ways that reduce risk on behavior have been mixed. The lack of consistent findings suggests a potential need to refine frameworks for the context of climate change. Through focus group interviews and qualitative data analysis, we investigated influences on behavioral adaptation to climate change among owners of small woodlands in the Upper Midwest, USA. We compared our findings with published psychosocial frameworks and developed a conceptual model of behavioral adaptation to climate change in managed forests that identifies perceived complexity as an important element of risk appraisal, and a variable that connects risk appraisal and response appraisal, potentially transforming response appraisal into a variable that mediates the influence of risk appraisal on response.
Fischer, AP; Russo, M; Powers, G
Behavioral adaptation to climate change: new insights on psychosocial frameworks from the context of managed forests
Sustainability Science