Climate change risk perception in the USA and alignment with sustainable travel behaviours

RESEARCH ARTICLE Climate change risk perception in the USA and alignment with sustainable travel behaviours Jean FletcherID1*, James Higham2,3, Nancy Longnecker1 1 Department of Science Communication, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2 Department of Tourism, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 3 Norwegian School of Hotel Management, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway * dr.j.m.fletcher@gmail.com Abstract In an online survey of 1071 Americans conducted in October 2016, we found technological optimism, environmental beliefs, and gender to be better predictors of climate change con- cern than respondents’ perceived ability to visualize the year 2050 and their future optimism. An important finding from this study is that in October 2016, just before the 2016 Presidential election, 74% of responding Americans were concerned about climate change. Climate change ranked as their second most serious global threat (behind terrorism). However, when asked to describe travel in the year 2050 only 29% of participants discussed lower car- bon options, suggesting that actively envisioning a sustainable future was less prevalent than climate change concern. Enabling expectations and active anticipation of a low carbon future may help facilitate mitigation efforts. Introduction The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1988 to summarize climate change research and to provide realistic response recommendations (http://www.ipcc. ch/). More than thirty years later, climate change continues to be a monumental problem [1].

The 2015 Paris Agreement was created as an international action plan to address climate change and was heralded as a political triumph for climate change mitigation [2]. Unfortu- nately, the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on June 1st, 2017 [3]. This is problematic as the U.S. is a significant emitter of greenhouse gases [3, 4]. In terms of the global carbon footprint (CF) of travel and tourism, the USA ranks first [5]. There- fore, successful mitigation of climate change at the global level will require American participation. Understanding how Americans judge climate change risk is important because people’s concern about climate change may influence their behaviours [6] or behavioural intentions [7]. There is a growing body of literature exploring how psychological distance may influence perceptions of climate change risk [8–12]. Psychological distance refers to an individual’s per- ception of how close something (for example a person, event, or time) is to their self [13]. It has been proposed that time, physical space, uncertainty and social identity can contribute to how psychologically distant people feel from climate change and its repercussions [8–13]. Our PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545 February 3, 2021 1 / 17 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Fletcher J, Higham J, Longnecker N (2021) Climate change risk perception in the USA and alignment with sustainable travel behaviours. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0244545. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0244545

Editor: Sergio Villamayor-Tomas, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, SPAIN Received: March 2, 2020 Accepted: December 13, 2020 Published: February 3, 2021 Copyright: © 2021 Fletcher et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the Supporting Information files of this paper. Funding: This study received support in the form of a research scholarship from the University of Otago, awarded to JF. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.