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

study adds to this discussion by exploring if temporal distance, specifically the notion that cli- mate change may be perceived to involve distant future events, affects how Americans’ judge climate change risk. We hypothesized that participants who find it difficult to visualize the dis- tant future and who are more optimistic about the future would be less concerned about cli- mate change. Our study was conducted at an interesting time in American climate change history. We surveyed Americans in late October 2016, almost two months after the United States officially joined the Paris Agreement [14] and three weeks before climate change denialist Donald Trump was elected as American president. Our study provides insight into the American pub- lic’s perception of climate change risk at this pivotal time in American and world history. We should also note that our survey was conducted three years before the Covid-19 pandemic drastically affected global travel. There are three sections to this paper. The first part lays out a theoretical framework pro- posing that a person’s ability to visualize the distant future (represented as the year 2050) and their optimism regarding the future influences how they judge climate change risk. The second part of the paper proceeds to test our proposed framework and considers whether other factors may be better predictors of climate change risk perception. The third section explores what participants envision the future (specifically travel in the year 2050) looking like and whether

climate mitigating options are depicted in their descriptions. Theoretical framework The IPCC has often discussed climate change in reference to the years 2050 or 2100 [1]. This could give people the impression that climate change is a future problem instead of a current problem. Whether people think about climate change as a current or future problem is impor- tant. Trope and Liberman’s Construal Level Theory (CLT) argues that a person thinks about an event differently if they expect it to happen tomorrow as opposed to some point in the medium to long-term future [15]. According to this theory, when climate change is perceived to be a temporally distant threat it will be approached differently than when it is perceived to be an immediate threat [13]. Bru¨gger, Morton, and Dessai explained that this is because indi- viduals will utilize different information when making proximal versus distant climate change decisions [16]. For example, their experiments on university students in the U.K. found that for participants who were asked questions in the context of climate change in their area (the U. K.), fear was a stronger factor in determining their climate change decisions. In contrast, for participants who were asked questions in the context of the wider world, scepticism was a stronger factor in their same climate change decisions [16]. Studies from Australia [8], United Kingdom [9], and the United States [10] have reported correlations between when participants expect climate change to affect an area and their level

of concern about climate change. Interestingly, research from Israel found that because it was perceived to be a distant threat, climate change was considered to be less threatening to partici- pants, regardless of how much concern it generated [17]. According to the CLT, the fact that people prioritize threats they perceive to be more imminent over those they consider distant even if the distant threat is believed to be more severe suggests that when making risk assess- ments, perceived temporal distances influences how much weight an individual gives to the severity of an event when making their decision. Unlike previous studies, our study explores temporal distance by focusing on two future related factors (Fig 1). In the following sections we discuss how thinking about the distant future in an abstract and unclear way may make it difficult to assess the implications of climate change. We also consider how optimism about the future, particularly regarding the ability of PLOS ONE Climate change risk perception in the USA and alignment with sustainable travel behaviours PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244545 February 3, 2021 2 / 17