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

atmosphere, space-based reflective shields, and carbon capturing and carbon sequestering [31]. Including technology that may not exist in future scenarios could give policymakers an unrealistic expectation of how much mitigation is required to keep earth habitable, and thus, they may develop response plans based on inferior information. Similarly, it has been sug- gested that technological myths may have been used by the aviation industry to reduce the per- ceived need for consumer action or policy responses [37]. By highlighting new or developing technology the aviation industry can give the public the false impression that they are close to creating low carbon forms of aeromobility even though these technologies may never eventu- ate or prove infeasible [37]. Travel in the year 2050. Climate change affects many things. This research focused spe- cifically on visualizations of future travel for two reasons. First, the transport sector is a signifi- cant contributor to global emissions producing an estimated 23% of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 [38]. This is expected to increase particularly within the aviation industry despite industry promises that they will reduce their emissions [37]. Second, areas within the tourism industry are being affected by climate change (for example ski fields and coral reefs) [39]. Thus, depending on how travel is defined, it could both cause and be affected by climate change. Spence, Poortinga and Pidgeon measured temporal distance by asking participants when

they expected climate change to affect Great Britain [9]. This study took a slightly different approach to temporal distance by asking respondents about a specific time point in the future– the year 2050. The year 2050 was selected for two reasons: 1) it is not necessarily beyond partic- ipants’ lifetime thereby potentially increasing its personal relevance [40], and 2) it is a symbolic year often used by the IPCC when discussing climate change [1]. Materials and methods Survey instrument An online survey was used to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Participants’ ability to visualize the future was measured using a multiple-choice question asking participants to self-report how clearly they could imagine the year 2050. This question was inspired by a ques- tion developed by Tonn, Hemrick, and Conrad which asks how clearly participants could imagine the future over a range of timeframes from 1 year to 100 years in the future [19]. We could have primed participants by first asking them questions that would help them envision specific aspects of the future; however, since we suspected that people do not normally spend much time thinking about the distant future we were more interested in their instinctive self- assessment of their ability to visualize the year 2050. For this reason, the question regarding participant’s self-reported ability to imagine the year 2050 was asked immediately following the demographics questions without any leading questions. Likert scale questions were used to

assess participants’ optimism and attitudes towards technology and environmental beliefs. Since survey length can affect response rate [41], we limited the number of questions from established self-reported scales. As a measure of optimism, two statements (I rarely count on good things happening to me and I am always optimistic about my future) were used from The Live Orientation Test Revised [42]. To assess technological optimism, two statements (Advanc- ing technology provides us with hope for the future and Future resource shortages will be solved by technology) were used from the Dominant Social Paradigm [43]. Concern towards climate change was measured in two ways. First participants were asked to rank seven global threats including climate change. These threats were taken from Lowe et al. [44], although it should be noted an eighth threat of poverty was inadvertently dropped from our study due to a human copy error. Next, participants answered a multiple-choice 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 5 / 17