International climate adaptation assistance: Assessing public support in Switzerland

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317344 February 12, 2025 7 / 26 PLOS ONE Support for adaptation assistance in Switzerland supported by popular vote in June 2023 with 59.1% of the votes. Broadly, opinion polls report a high level of awareness of vulnerability to climate change as well [75]. This reflects, in large part, the ecological sensitivity of the country’s Alpine region (including the issue of reced- ing glaciers), its importance for core sectors such as tourism, agriculture, water, and energy, as well as citizens’ identification with and attachment to the Alpine landscape. Thus, Swiss respondents are likely to have a high appreciation for the need to adapt, even as the country seeks to mitigate global climate change. Furthermore, because there is a strong element of direct democracy in Switzerland, where voters are called to express their opinion on specific policies multiple times every year, the use of surveys is highly appropriate in the Swiss context to assess public support for a given policy [76]. The results can inform policymakers about specific frames or features that drive individ- uals’ support for overseas climate adaptation assistance. The Swiss context also captures the broader trends in European and global politics to both the unfolding trajectory of climate change and the rise of right-wing parties. Following the highly salient heatwave of 2003, Europe has experienced a steady increase in average tempera- ture, droughts, and sudden onsets of floods and wildfires. Such events are widely covered in

the media. At the same time, with the rise of right-wing parties, issues such as climate change, development aid, and migration have become more contentious and salient. By probing pub- lic opinion on the question of overseas adaptation assistance in the case of Switzerland, this paper seeks to provide new empirical evidence on the interface of domestic public opinion with climate aid and immigration. Switzerland constitutes a strong candidate for replicating the Japan study by Uji et al. [26]. While immigration is not a salient issue in Japan, it is a highly salient one in Switzerland, due to the politicization and instrumentalization by right-wing parties [27,28,29]. In addition, the rising immigration flows have motivated European countries to offer aid to overseas countries to stem immigration [30] – a strategy officially acknowledged as one of the objectives of Swit- zerland’s development assistance by the Swiss government [77]. The financing of development aid, moreover, has become a contentious issue in Swiss politics – with drastic cuts proposed and supported by right and center-right parties in recent years [78]. These characteristics suggest that both adaptation aid and immigration are more salient and contested in the Swiss context as opposed to Japan. Replicating the study in the Swiss context and comparing results across these cases is important for several reasons. First, in and of itself, the replication of the methodology in another donor country expands the comparative understanding of the factors that shape

public support for policies that increase adaptation aid and acceptance of climate migrants, and the overall external validity of the results. While replicability is a core tenet of rigorous and impactful research, it tends to be practiced much more readily in the natural sciences, compared to social sciences. This is often a consequence of data availability, concerns about comparability of units of analysis, and discounting the practical value of such research, unlike in life sciences where replication is a core and necessary element of practical applications. We contend that to improve policy understanding of the politics that could unlock support for increased adaptation assistance, systematic examination of such factors across different donor countries is necessary. Second, not only do Japan and Switzerland differ in key respects when it comes to the salience and politicization of migration and aid, but also as previously mentioned demo- graphic and political situations observed in Switzerland are part of a broader European trend. As such, while cautious of the generalizability of results beyond the Swiss context, this com- parison may offer a first understanding of preference formation in contexts where immigra- tion and aid are highly salient and politicized topics.